Buffalo Nichols

★★★★ Buffalo Nichols

FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP/MC

Reclaiming the blues for the angry and dispossessed.

For a genre that once gave voice to the neglected and marginalised, the blues as a social and political force has been underperforming for decades. Austin, Texas-based Carl ‘Buffalo’ Nichols is on a mission to change that, wrestling it away from electric guitar pyrotechnics and sitting the lives of modern Black Americans back at its heart. Drawing from his childhood growing up in a poor part of Milwaukee, playing in church and extensive European travels, his roots, anger, and pain burrow deep. Although he acknowledges that the blues can be joyful, Nichols isn’t in the mood: on Living Hell he sings, “I still go to church but it ain’t to save myself, I just like to hear the stories ‘bout how you’re going to hell”, with such conviction you truly fear for his target’s soul. Stripped back and raw, his mesmerising guitar front and centre, this is gritty old-style blues with a laser-sharp modern focus.

Andy Fyfe