Garcia Peoples

★★★★ Dodging Dues NO QUARTER. CD/DL/LP

New Jersey jam band’s fired-up response to the mess we’re in.

Having unleashed a 32-minute title track on 2019’s One Step Behind, the following album Nightcap At Wits’ End broke Garcia Peoples’ acid boogie into 12 shorter songs. Dodging Dues is their shortest statement yet, offering seven songs in 34 minutes, with a stripped-down, countrified focus, their version perhaps of the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead/American

Beauty phase. Indeed, Tough Freaks and Cold Dice could be Dead compositions from that time. A newly politicised anger to their lyrics also thrives. The album title comes from Tough Freaks (“Sick of dodging dues… Never in my life will I trust fools”), while there’s a palpable tension to the hard rock frazzle of Stray Cats and Fill Your Cup. There is one longer song, Here We Are, eight wondrous minutes led by pedal steel that crystallises their will to fight on: “Crush defeat to dust… Will we make it past sundown.”