A first for me...a blues
album from a band in Finland! The band is L.R.
Phoenix & Mr Mo'Hell. OK, so Finland isn't the
first place that springs to mind when you think
about the blues, but these guys sound like they know
what they're doing and they know their blues.
The title track, 'Wrecked,' is also the opening track on the CD. It
has an enormously catchy riff that has your feet
tapping, and it went round and round in my head for
ages after I stopped listing to the CD.
L.R.Phoenix is
originally from near London, England, but he made
the move to Finland when he was in his late 20s and
met up with Mr. Mo' Hell in North Karelia, way up
near the Russian border. The story they tell is a
little reminiscent of Robert Johnson's tale of the
crossroads, with Mr. Mo'Hell sitting by a lake
playing a drum of reindeer skin stretched over the
skull of a moose and being visited by a man with a
long beard who arrived across the lake in a boat.
Well, a little publicity
story never hurt, did it?
The music these guys
make has a lot of flavour of R.L.Burnside
(especially the guitar work) and other Mississippi
hill country musicians like Junior Kimbrough (plus a
bit of Jim Morrison in the vocals). Close your eyes
and you could be listening to a couple of guys from
Mississippi, instead of an Englishman and a Finn.
Throughout the album the
sound of the drums is pushing the guitar and vocals
along, sounding at times like the chanting beat of
Native Americans. It's refreshingly different and
it's hard to believe that just two musicians make
this sound. The two of them radiate an indecent
amount of energy, so much so that they must be
totally drained at the end of a session! Track five, "On The Run", nearly had me bouncing off of my
chair!
Actually, by track
seven, "Red Haired Girl", they do slow down to
almost ballad speed. But things start to pick up
again, just a little, with "My Leaving" and then
quite a bit more with "Whole Night Long", a track
that sounds like it could have been recorded by The
Doors way back when.
The final track, "Missing You", is back to Hill Country Blues out of
Mississippi by way of Finland, and it's truly
representative of what these guys are about. Their
hearts are in the blues and only a geographical
mismanagement is to blame for the fact that they
aren't in the Southern states of the USA making
their music.
This CD deserves a
listen by anyone who is a fan of Mississippi blues,
especially of the Hill Country variety. It will open
your ears to the fact that a couple of Europeans can
play the blues. Oh, and by the way, L.R. Phoenix
wrote every track on the CD.
--- Terry Clear