Attention spans being what they are today (still with me?), a 14 track album risks losing the listener well before its closing moments.
A neat, concise, conforming 11 track, 45 minute album is about all can handle nowadays. Still, I'd be hard pushed to select the best 11 on
'Let The Truth Be Known'.
This is the debut album from George Lynch's side project, Souls Of
We (neither do I). He's joined by relative unknowns Johnny Chow on bass and Yael on drums, and London Legrand on vocals. Legrand is vocalist with Glamrock "supergroup", Brides of Destruction, which also includes Nikki Sixx.
'
Let The Truth's.' title track is a thick, bubbling soup of sleaze and white boy blues though elsewhere the album's eclecticism (and refusal to be pigeonholed) may well be its undoing.
'Skeleton Key', '
Everything I Want' and '
Key Of Noise' all go down the traditional heavy guitar rock route, with a bluesy undercurrent, fizzing and crackling, leaving the smell of ozone in their wake.
These tracks recall classic Zeppelin and more recently, the late lamented Little Caesar.
Lynch may well be the name musician on this swaggering, in-your-face-with-attitude album of lust, life, love and drug addiction, but it feels like a real band. The rhythm section lay down a densely constructed, bass heavy bedrock, leaving stacks of room for Lynch to carve out a thundering groove or to build a fuzzy, thick cut riff.
Always the perfect framework for Legrand's dissecting lyrics and grizzly, growling vocals.
Occasionally the band wander into LA hardrock/sleaze metal territory, outgunning Tracii and Axl on the immense, soul searching
'St.Jude' and on the vampiric voodoo vibe of '
Push It'.
These 2 tracks maintain the album's irresistible momentum, accelerating aggressively into the punky, punchy '
Psycho Circus', then plunging headlong into '
North 13's industrial strength, heavy metal sludge.
Inevitably, Lynch closes the album with a ricocheting rock instrumental,
'Under The Dead Tree', where pounding rhythms underline and punctuate Lynch's hugely powerful yet delicately articulate melody lines.
There's life in the old dog yet.
Written by
Brian Tuesday, February 10, 2009
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