ROUnD-UP: blues
Big Boy Bloater
Pills
provogue/maSCot
When cult r&B kingpin Big Boy Bloater announced his battle with depression in 2016, a concern was that the medication would soften his mordant black-comedy world view. apparently not. With a sleeve evoking the stones’ lips stuffed with tranquilisers, Pills
announces that nothing is off limits for piss-take, then kicks into a garage-blues title track with lyrics that sound like a Pfizer stock-take (‘Pills to wake me up, pills to help me sleep/Uppers and
downers, colours all around us…’ ). so begins an album of wonky, witty, genre-roaming pleasures, held together by Bloater’s untutored bellow and dystopian lyrics. The Digital number of
The Beast sounds like box-fresh soul until Big Boy Bloater: an album of wonky, witty, genreroaming pleasures. you realise it’s about how technology will destroy us all. The gospel-bolstered
Friday night’s alright For Drinking makes alcoholism seem almost spiritual. mouse organ is a death march with dark
couplets (‘it’s better to break a head than break a heart’ ), while a life Full of Debt hides its wry skewering of consumerism beneath balmy Hawaiian guitar. evidently, the drugs do work.
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Geoff Everett
Night Patrol
SelF-releaSeD
The British blues veteran just keeps rolling back the years. much Worse Than
i Thought is a gutsy, gallows-humour stomp, Where Did she get
The money? pairs a wasp-in-a-bottle lick with lyrical potshots at a faux-intellectual with her ‘nose in the air like a proud and
snooty mare’ – and everett plays his arse off throughout, spraying every song with flourishes of hard-earned musicianship.
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Steve Hill The One-Man Blues Rock Band
manhaton
Hill’s one-man-band approach is an eyepopping live spectacle, the canadian splitting his limbs between guitar and drums, his larynx between vocals and harp. obviously, you can’t appreciate that dexterity on record, so his songs had better be good. and they are: opener rhythm all
over is a slide-screaming riot, while emily heaves with chunky country-blues hooks.
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Patrick Sweany
Ancient Noise
nine mile
as a scholar of the past masters, the ohio bandleader sounds energised by cutting live on the hallowed ground of sam Phillips recording, and he turns in some special takes, whether blowing out his throat on the pummelling Up and
Down or bleeding into the glorious echo-chamber lament of steady. These are ancient noises indeed, but in sweany’s hands, they feel fresh and relevant.
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mike Zito
First Class Life
ruF
Flying solo suits the former royal southern Brother. it takes a writer nudging the top of his game to excel on both the socially charged slow blues of The World We live in and the roistering mama
Don’t like no Wah Wah. But the track that
stays with you is old Black graveyard, where Jimi-worthy guitar makes a harrowing counterpoint to zito’s observations of a tumbledown Texas cemetery.
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