Well. It’s been a long time but the big wheel keeps on toinin as John Fogarty used to say, and suddenly we have a new Rory Gallagher album, it’s picking up very positive reviews, even in the UK press, and it’s barging its way into the UK album charts like the old days.
Plus ca change, as the Hog might say, the more things change the more they remain the same, and if you missed him while he was away, then his return is all the more welcome. Welcome, particularly in the context of our late 1987 pop environment on which the satellites have overlaid a terrible bland uniformity, bith visual and musical. Against that backdrop, it’s hardly surprising that the roots revival continues with ever-increasing vigour. People need to feel they can touch and be touched, reach and be reached.
Defender finds Gallagher right in tune with those sentiments. It is his most primal album in a decade and a half, based on his love for and faith in the blues, his ecyclopedic knowledge of elemental American musics and his own direct and earthy sensibility.
‘Kickback City’, the opening cut, is traditional Gallagher turf, angrily protesting the demoralisation he sees around him (could be about Dublin!) over a pounding rhythm and some very fine controlled power guitar playing. “Faces in sidestreets, hiding like angels from grace,” he sings, “Selling your sorrow/renting tomorrow/you’re out of place.”
‘Loneshark Blues’, another short story from the same collection, patrols the same patch, but over an evil loping clickety-click-Sun-Studio rockabilly beat. It builds and builds in urgency and intensity, but never explodes over the top.
That kind of understated violence, that sense of power that is kept under leash is a hallmark of this album, and is Gallagher’s renewed understanding of and commitment to the things he does best.
Like ‘The Continental Op’, the third track, rolling in on a John Lee Hooker-style riff – and riffs are all over the album, but they are blues riffs, rhythmic punctuations and pulses utterly unlike the elaborate gothic stairways beloved of heavy metal bands . . .
Because, above all, Gallagher is a suberb blues guiarist – the opening solo of the sawing electric blues ‘I Ain’t No Saint’ providing an object lesson for all blueser apprentices. And then, in the last verse, he starts to stroke the guitar strings with a bottleneck off in the background . . . Great!
And if the closer on side one, ‘Failsafe Day’ is relatively weak, side two sets off on the high road again with ‘Road To Hell’ (ah! The devil’s music again) and ‘Doing Time’.
On the first there are odd reminiscent flashes of the newly fashionable Jimi Hendrix, and on the second Gallagher tosses off some vintage slide guitar over Keith Richard-style slashing chords and a tale of dirty deeds and frustration.
And dirty deeds are also the subject of ‘Smear Campaign’, another story drawn from his Hammett collection, maybe about a city election somewhere in the States, but maybe also about Neil Kinnock’s fate in the last UK election, and pushed along by a riff that harks all the way back to ‘Blister On The Moon’. Then it’s into Sonny Boy Williamson’s classic ‘Don’t Start Me Talkin’’, great blues featuring Mark feltham on harp (though more Little Walter than Sonny Boy?!).
‘Seven Days’ which closes the album takes it right back down, acoustic guitars strumming and sliding in another tale of violence, anger and the seamy side of life – folk music almost, but with the same cinematic feel as has been evidence in some of Ry Cooder’s recent movie soundtrack albums . . .
And that’s it, although my copy also included a free 45 which you might also het if you lash out now, featuring the shuffling declamatory ‘Seems To Me’, (of which his sometime associate Muddy Waters would be proud) and ‘No Peace For The Wicked’. What is most welcome is the control and cohesiveness of the whole project – the album hangs together, has a real feel to it, and makes no concessions to the MTV lush HM big ballad crossover market.
It’s the blues, filtered and reinterpreted by Rory Gallagher and its very good.