Tag Archives: blues rock

BRASS OWL – State Of Mind

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Brass Owl unleashed their self-titled debut album in the summer of 2018. While that record was loaded with great riffs and showed promise, it was also fatally flawed. More than great riffs are needed to create great songs and their song writing wasn’t always the most memorable. Also, in frontman Brian Tarter, the band seemed to be hampered by a vocalist who often…overstretched himself.

Unfortunately, since Tarter also supplies those great guitar riffs and actually represents fifty percent of the band on 2020’s ‘State of Mind’, Brass Owl are sort of stuck with him. As a result, it is another album where a massive amount of promise is evident, but the genuine quality doesn’t always come through.

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LITTLE ALBERT – Swamp King EP

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Not to be confused with the Hong Kong rap artist who released his fourth album ‘2019’ at the beginning of 2020, this Little Albert is a project helmed by Albert Piccolo, a musician best known for fronting Italian doom metal act Messa. Albert takes a sidestep from the heaviness for his first recording as “Little Albert”, choosing instead to apply lots of dark and fuzzy guitar to six pieces of dirty blues music.

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BIG RIVER – Redemption

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Released over three years after the band’s formation, Big River’s debut album was a long time coming. Between 2016 and 2019, the band spent what seemed to be an eternity playing small venues on the UK’s south coast. The constant live work made sense, no matter how small a venue; there’s no point in spending money on recording before there’s an audience. Having been guitarist with several grassroots rock acts before Big River were even a twinkle of an idea, that’s something that band founder Damo Fawsett knows only too well. Three years of gigging eventually paid off, though, when in 2019 Big River scored support slots with both John Corabi (ex-The Scream/Union/Motley Crue) and Marco Mendoza (Dead Daisies/Black Star Riders).

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KRISSY MATTHEWS – Monster In Me

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Krissy Matthews sounds like a man who’s always had an old soul. His vocals might never have shown the deceptive rasp of Johnny Lang, but musically, his 2015 album ‘Scenes From A Moving Window’ showcased musical influences that far pre-dated his twenty three years on the planet. More impressively, it was his fifth album… By the time of his sixth album’s birth, he still hadn’t reached the grand old age of thirty, but 2019’s ‘Monster In Me’ continues his tradition of delivering a pot pourri of blues, funk and occasional hard rock with all of the confidence of a man who’d been recording for decades.

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THE RIVEN – The Riven

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On their debut EP ‘Blackbird’, The Riven showed a lot of promise. With a fusion of hard rock and blues, the EP presented five songs with an old fashioned spirit and some great vocals, but was rather let down by its recording budget. Sadly, tunes that deserved a huge crunch were all too often left feeling a little muddy.

A lot happened over the next couple of years. The band relocated from London to Sweden, played live shows, gained a recording deal with The Sign Records [home to Wheel In The Sky, Highrider and Grande Royale] and then decamped to Spain to record a full length album.

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