The Switcher Holds Weight, Listen Here First!
Scott Zuppardo
Posted On June 17, 2016
Seattle trio Lonesome Shack has 14 new songs in their custom-honed, primitive yet eerily confidence boosting boogie beats, sexed up Hill Country trance blues, and peppered with an unwavered northwest garage sound. The Switcher is slated for a June 24th exit to the edifice of the record industry abyss, released for all to soundtrack their summer dance party or lack thereof – a backdrop for the pool and the pity party, if you will.
The band brings something for the self-effacing introvert and self-disgracing extrovert, sinful rhythms for the scantily clad, and suicide dirges for the third eye blues, even a few to lift you from one foxhole and safely back to the other. That is, after all, what we humans long for; something to be sad about and something to be conversely happy about, when simplified to the congruent denominator. When there is neither, enter boredom, and we all know idle hands are the devil’s playthings.
The Switcher is a record that can hold equal audible weight in 1965 as 2065. The timeless clank of Ben Todd’s chordal offerings and misgivings go hand in hand with Kristian Garrard’s at times ‘Bo Diddley-esque’ beat mining and slick rolls and fills. The latter edition of bassist Luke Bergman for the band’s last two records, the live one-take recording of 2012’s City Man and 2014’s stellar More Primitive, has the band in its best shack shackin’ permutation.Todd’s lyrical flourish waxes poetic well beyond his years. One imagines a sweat soaked southern black man, aged in endless work and worry, clinging to his guitar like you should the seat cushion in a watery plane wreck, God forbid. Quite the opposite, Ben Todd was steeped in New Mexico and is now enjoyed from Seattle, Washington although the band is no stranger to a big time Mississippi blues festival or few. Todd chimed this in on the new record,
"This album is the culmination of several years of work recorded mostly live one day at Dandelion Gold, Johnny Goss's home studio in Seattle. The songs draw from experiences of traveling, losing friends, finding love, dancing, picking apples, failing, succeeding and switching."
Ladies and gentlemen, I premier to you…
The Switcher in its entirety (and a video to boot)…Rock-n-roll forever and ever, Amen:
sadsongskeepthedevilaway@gmail.com
