SIMO. Provogue/Mascot Label Group. 15 Oct 2017
It’s a rare occasion these days that a piece of music has instant appeal. Even the so-called classic era of rock music would normally take a listen or two to draw you in, with the artist capable of instant fandom a rare and special commodity. I am quite pleased to note that the latest offering from SIMO is exactly that, an album full of tunes that won me over right from the get-go. I hadn’t really heard of SIMO prior to this, but I’m certainly keen to find out more now.
Rise & Shine is the band’s third long-player, and their second on their label, and it is a very impressive collection of tunes. Doing a bit of background reading on the Nashville, Tennessee trio, centred and named for guitarist-frontman JD Simo, I found they’d toured with the likes of the Allman Brothers, Deep Purple and Joe Bonamassa, so I’m not surprised to find that I got right into what SIMO was doing.
The music is along the lines of those aforementioned bands, being bluesy, funky, cruisy and a bit psychedelic too. The guitars are a pleasure and the grooving beats are instantly enjoyable. From the slow build of opener Return, to the funky chicken-peck guitar of People Say, the rollicking instrumental funk of The Climb, to the epic blues of
Light The Candle, this album’s got plenty to enjoy.
The pace is changed up for a few sultry numbers like I Want Love and acoustic The Light, before the whole thing wraps with a massive 13-minute epic I Pray, which is a great social commentary on everything going on in the world right now, sans all the right proselytising and leftist populism. For a cynic like me, this brings everything together beautifully!
On top of great tunes and subject matter, the feel of the album is raw and vintage, with a real ballsy sound, rich and warm with oodles of tone. The virtuosic guitar interludes are accompanied by solid drums and bass, and solid rock vocals. This is the kind of album that packs in the appeal for musos as well as having plenty for a casual listener too. Fans of ’70s blues rock, a la Allman Brothers, Hendrix, Deep Purple, even Creedence, will love this!
I’ve had a ball listening to SIMO for weeks now in the car, in the house, and anywhere. Great stuff… now, to check out their back catalogue!
Luke Balzan
SIMO is an American rock band which formed in Nashville, TN. The group is notable for having virtuoso guitarist JD Simo as the centerpiece and namesake. A psychedelic soul modern rock band that also incorporates extended improvisation into its live sets, the group consists of JD Simo (guitar, vocals), Adam Abrashoff (drums), and Elad Shapiro (bass, backing vocals).
Track Listing
1. Return
2. Meditation
3. Shine
4. People Say
5. Don’t Waste Time
6. I Want Love
7. The Climb
8. Light The Candle
9. Be With You
10. The Light
11. I Pray
Black Stone Cherry. Mascot Label Group. 15 Oct 2017
It’s well known that modern hard rock and metal music has the blues as its roots. Born out of the pain of slavery in the US, the style developed from the early 1900s and gradually gained momentum, with its veiled subject matter and story-telling, rocking African rhythms and irresistible and distinctive chord structures, until rock’n’roll was born, and the rest is history.
Rhythm and blues was an underlying factor in some of the biggest rock acts of all time, including the Stones, Zeppelin, Hendrix and more, with obvious extensions into the metal end of the spectrum. With all that in mind, it’s great to hear when hard rock bands pay homage to the style that started it all.
Kentucky metal act Black Stone Cherry, who had a killer rock album Kentucky out last year, have done exactly that, with their new EP Black To Blues, which has a bunch of immortal blues classics, given a characteristic Black Stone Cherry makeover to great effect.
There are tunes like Muddy Water’s Hoochie Coochie Man, Albert King’s Born Under A Bad Sign, Howlin’ Wolf’s Built For Comfort and Freddie King’s Palace Of The King, and more.
The breadth of cover tunes is wide, and equally wide is Black Stone Cherry’s take on these classics. If you’re a rock fan and not too familiar with this kind of stuff, check out Black To Blues, which serves as a great introduction to an amazing world. And it’s a great little release in its own right too!
Luke Balzan
Black Stone Cherry is an American hard rock band, formed in 2001 in Edmonton, Kentucky. The band consists of Chris Robertson (lead vocals, lead guitar), Ben Wells (rhythm guitar, backing vocals), Jon Lawhon (bass guitar, backing vocals), and John Fred Young (drums, backing vocals). Black Stone Cherry has released six studio albums: Black Stone Cherry (2006), Folklore and Superstition (2008), Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (2011), Magic Mountain (2014), Kentucky (2016), Black To Blues (2017).
Track Listing
1. Built For Comfort
2. Champagne & Reefer
3. Palace Of The King
4. Hoochie Coochie Man
5. Born Under A Bad Sign
6. I Want To Be Loved
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 27 Sep 2017
At short notice, my ‘plus-one’ wasn’t able to join me for this concert but circumstances saw me give my spare ticket away to an engaging Costa Rican tourist whom I saw busily snapping away on his camera in the downstairs foyer of the Adelaide Town Hall and happily engaging with the theatre staff about the beauty of the building. He didn’t seem sure at first whether to accept my offer, but he did. During the interval we chatted and I learned that he was in town for the international space conference, and was presenting a paper on the performance of a machine in a micro gravity environment. Apart from his obvious intellectual prowess and exemplary English that would leave most Aussies in the slow lane, he also had a keen ear for fine music playing. I knew this when he commented that Amanda Forsyth played Beethoven and Chopin ‘with her entire body’. Amanda Forsyth of course is the cellist in the Zuckerman Trio, which is completed with the renowned Pinchas Zuckerman on violin and Angela Cheng on piano.
My new friend was of course quite right. Forsyth is one of the most talented and insightful cellists around, and her musicality and free spirit was on best display in Arensky’s Piano Trio No.1 in D minor, Op.32. Up until this performance I had never heard this work live, and all I could compare the Zuckerman’s performance to was my superb recording by The Lenore Piano Trio on the Hyperion label. The Zuckerman’s found something fresh in this delightful composition, and Forsyth revelled in having the lion’s share in stating the delightful and numerous themes. The scherzo waltz-like second movement zipped along with humour and flashes of virtuosic chutzpah from all three instrumentalists. Zuckerman himself makes it look so easy. Cheng is a picture of calmness and precision, while Forsyth looks and sounds commanding - almost nonchalant.
The programme began with Beethoven’s Sonata No.1 in D, Op.12 No.1 for violin and piano. He wrote ten sonatas for piano and violin, with the later sonatas eclipsing the earlier ones for popularity and musical daring. Zuckerman and Cheng were clinical in their performance: the many fragments in the composition were clearly and emphatically stated, some with more resoluteness than others, and the spotlight passed seamlessly backwards and forwards between them both. Equals, as it should be.
Chopin’s Cello Sonata in G minor, Op.65, is a troubled piece. It is almost as if Chopin did not ‘know where to be at’ with it. Where the Beethoven almost luxuriated in the freedom of loosely related musical ideas, the Chopin is a relentless search for a narrative. It’s there, but it takes concertation to appreciate its delicacy, and Cheng and Forsyth laid it out clearly before us. Cheng’s precise phrasing and finely balanced dynamics gave Forsyth the perfect aural canvas to clearly expose the subtlety of Chopin’s musical scheme.
At the conclusion of the concert, my new Costa Rican friend said his goodbye’s and left the Town Hall to return to his conference to ponder the intricacies of human kind’s engagement with space, but I suspect he did so with a different ‘music of the spheres’ at the front of his mind, at least for a while.
Kym Clayton
When: 27 Sep
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Town Hall. 16 Sep 2017
This is surely one of the best, if not the best, performance of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra this season, and it is the night principal Conductor Nicholas Carter loses his Bruckner virginity! (He announced on social media sometime after the concert that it was his “… first Bruckner tonight”!)
Bruckner’s Symphony No.4 in E-flat, which he himself nicknamed the Romantic, was revised on a number of occasions and not always by the composer himself. Tonight’s concert is the so-called Nowak edition (after the esteemed musicologist and Bruckner authority Leopold Nowak). It is an epic work and plays for around seventy minutes, making it one of the longest symphonies ever composed (though not the longest – that honor goes to Havergal Brian’s 105 minutes long Symphony No 1. The Gothic!).
Bruckner’s 4th is heavy lifting, and the glistening sweat on Maestro Carter’s brow is evident during the rapturous bows when it is all over; the applause is richly deserved. The composition features much use of the horns and brass, and it is fitting that Carter first acknowledges Adrian Uren, section leader of the horns. When horns have such a dominant role, there is always an air of tension and anticipation just before its first note is played. Will the pitch be perfect? Will pesky overtones get in the way?
Happily, Uren nails it from the first horn call over the tremoring strings, and keeps nailing it. The majesty and solemnity of the composition is never in doubt.
Celia Craig is outstanding on the oboe, as always, and Julia Grenfell on flute is sweetness personified. Peter Whish-Wilson has a ball on tuba and gives depth to the sonority of the performance. David Phillips on double bass clearly ‘grooves’ Bruckner and is a joy to watch.
The orchestra features a number of new faces – at least new to this reviewer – and to a person they perform as if they are seasoned members of the ASO: Caleb Wright and Michael Robertson on viola, Louis Cann on double bass, Liam O’Malley on trombone, to name a few.
Carter places the second violins on his right which produces a rich antiphonal effect that greatly enhances the heady richness of the music. A similar arrangement is used for the performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4 in G earlier in the evening. At the keyboard is French virtuoso Jean-Efflam Bavouzet who gives a relaxed but highly assured reading of the ever-popular concerto. Dressed in a comfortable black lounge suit with open-necked shirt, Bavouzet beguiles us and amply demonstrates his deep understanding and familiarity with Beethoven’s piano music. Bavouzet applies considerable forearm strength and gives a robust performance, but one which includes the grace, lightness of touch, and delicate phrasing - as well as humour - that is also demanded by this composition. The empathy between Carter and Bavouzet is evident.
As cheekily mentioned above, this was Carter’s first Bruckner, and one hopes it is not his last, especially with the Adelaide Symphony. Bruckner’s 7th is scheduled for next June under the baton of esteemed English conductor Mark Wigglesworth, so perhaps, just perhaps we may have the beginnings of a full Bruckner cycle to play out over the coming years; fingers crossed.
This concert, however was a one-off! So much effort invested into just one performance. I feel so lucky for having been there, and the feeling from the audience is unanimous – it was indeed a special evening.
Kym Clayton
When: 16 Sep 2017
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Triggerfinger. Mascot Label Group. 17 Aug 2017
It’s an interesting experience to consider yourself a bit of a musical aficionado, keeping up to date with the best that rock has to offer, and then discover an exciting new band, only to discover that said band has actually been around for almost 20 years! That’s what happened to me with Belgian act Triggerfinger. I came across them on YouTube, excited to have found what I thought to be a new group of grungey troubadours peddling a fresh album Colossus, and as I did a bit of digging to see what other albums they had, expecting to see maybe one or two more, I found that they’d been around since the ’90s and had six long players under their belts!
I’ve got some catching up to do!
So, putting my lack of familiarity to the side, why was I so excited about hearing these guys? Well, their music is simply fantastic! They remind me of a rawer version of Queens Of The Stone Age, kind of more Kyuss but less fuzzy, and a bit more Zeppelin-esque balls, with Physical Graffiti-era complexity. The music is pure rock, with a raw vintage sound, but with a certain sincerity, not in a try-hard wanna-be-folk-band way. Guitars are fuzzy and psychedelic, with driving bass and drums, interludes of keys and other sounds rounding out the musical journey.
The vocals are quite clean over the raw rock, in a similar way to Queens vocalist Josh Homme, but singer Ruben Block has a unique voice that sits more somewhere between Jack White and Muse’s Matt Bellamy. It’s a great balance, helping the music sound fresh and familiar at the same time. The Belgian trio have got their sound just right, such that it feels bigger than just a trio, and they know how to balance light and shade across the album.
The rock heart is always apparent, but there are some great interludes and changes of pace too. The first single Flesh Tight is an obvious winner, while title-track opener Colossus sets the scene for the rest of the album. My only criticism of the collection is that it’s kind of short, spanning just over 30 minutes - but it’s such a great half-hour nonetheless!
Triggerfinger have apparently built quite the reputation overseas, including their European home as well as the US and Canada, but obviously not so much here in Oz. Let’s hope that Colossus helps to change that, cos these guys are awesome! Now, to buy some of that back-catalogue…
Luke Balzan
Triggerfinger is a Belgian rock band from Lier, Belgium, formed in 1998. The band consists of vocalist and guitarist Ruben Block, bassist Paul Van Bruystegem and Mario Goossens as drummer.
Track Listing
1. Colossus
2. Flesh Tight
3. Candy Killer
4. Upstairs Box
5. Afterglow
6. Breathlessness
7. That'll Be The Day
8. Bring Me Back A Live Wild One
9. Steady Me
10. Wollensak Walk