What do
you get when you take a rock industry legend, the greatest blues guitarist of
his generation and one of the most highly regarded, and well-traveled blues
keyboard players in music history and put them all together? You come up with The Rides, and Can’t Get Enough. This is, by far, one of the better albums I
have heard all year. I wasn’t sure what
my reaction would be considering hearing Kenny Wayne Shephard without Noah Hunt
(his vocalist and longtime collaborator) would be a little odd, and I’m not
completely sold on Shephard the vocalist anyway.
What I
got instead was a true, honest-to-goodness blues record by three guys that
obviously know what they’re doing. The
musicians are all at the tops of their games here (as you would expect) and the
album is something that can be played on continuous rotation, it's just that good. While Kenny Wayne Shephard as a vocalist is
not something that I am really too enthused about (and never have been) he does
a great job here of working with the music and not trying to do too much. His higher pitch provides adequate vocal work
that is a decent contradiction to the older, scratchier voices of his
contemporaries as well. The best parts
of the album are the new songs that were written for the album (especially
“Don’t Want Lies” which has a strained vocal that actually adds to the
desperation of the song and singer himself and completely avoids making it sound
silly – and you get this in both acoustic and electric form if you buy the Best
Buy exclusive pack). Where those
originals excel far beyond where I even expected them to, the covers of Neil
Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” and Iggy and the Stooges’ “Search and
Destroy” fall a little flat. They were
inspired choices that just didn’t carry through on the promise of quality. With the rest of the album so heavily
influenced by the blues and embracing that influence wholeheartedly, those two
tracks in particular just feel out of place.
That
being said, when the band actually gets the bat on the ball, so to speak, they
hit it out of the park. This is probably
one of the best blues albums I have heard since Kenny Wayne Shephard’s last
release a few years ago and it is, by far, near the top of the list for best
rock albums of the year. Though I doubt
this partnership between these three will last beyond this one album as they
all have their own projects to get to, it was a welcome divergence on all their
parts and one that they should absolutely consider making again.
No comments:
Post a Comment