The Hardest Walk

Five years after Jack White’s avant-blues accidentally kick-started the revival for all things black-American, oppressed and 80-years old, this fourth studio album from fellow Motor City-ites (via Toledo, Ohio) The Soledad Brothers seems like a relic from another age.
Weird Canadians rule the indie clubs and nervy Brooklyn David Byrneophiles are keeping t-shirts stripy and hair boot-polish black, and meanwhile here reappears a band with a Stones fetish and a predisposition to grindy, sawdust-floored, sub-Dirtbombs bar-fight blues.
Unlike the Stripes, they don’t modern it up with art manifestos and numerology, but that’s kind of OK: in fact, …Walk works best when they’re puppeteering the clichés.
The best tracks have a pleasing simplicity suggestive of Harry Smith’s telegrammatically written Anthology catalogue. The blustering ‘Truth Or Consequences’ is WOMAN DISCARDS MAN, MAN FORESEES COMEUPPANCE FOLLOWING TIME PERIOD OF INDETERMINATE LENGTH. The Dylan-meets-MC5ism of ‘Downtown Paranoia Blues’ is DISAPPEARANCE OF WOMAN FROM BEDROOM ALARMS MAN, MAN IMAGINES MULTIPLE INALLEGIANCES AND LAUGHTER OF PEERS. Multi-beer weepie ‘Crying Out Loud (Tears Of Joy)’, meanwhile, stars the original blues cliché, the sexually omnivorous woman, streeling through the streets, dishevelled and stinking of several men, her mind an utter blank except for a vampiric hunger for more boot-knocking.
And ‘downtown’, meanwhile, is apparently a city built entirely out of quick-hire motels. No wonder blues songs will always be popular.
When the Brothers swerve back into more modern concerns (say, your woman seeing only one other man), it’s a lot less interesting, and much of the remaining tracks supply little more than featureless blues jams with pop songs hidden under near-incessant Mick’n’Keef worship (hark those tambourines and Johnny Walker’s Suthurn draaaawl).
Completely out-of-character album closer ‘True To Zou Zou’, a gentle reflection set to sunshiney Jim O’Rourke guitars, leaves you wondering whether you want more such beautiful Zen-pop from them, or just more amusingly basic but heartfelt blues classicism. Both, please.