The Cold Stares Keep it Heavy on Fifth Album
Grant Britt
Posted On August 12, 2021
Like Jack Bruce slingin’ Cream atop Mountain, The Cold Stares recreate the bombast of Bruce’s vocals and bass merged with guitarist Leslie West’s Mountain-climbing licks with Ginger Baker mounting an artillery assault from the rear.
The Western Kentucky-bred, Indiana-based duo — guitarist Chris Tapp and percussionist Brian Mullins — fill in all the spaces with a whole lot of big foot-shakin’ going on. Sam Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis served as host for most of Heavy Shoes, but there’s a heavier, darker, tone to the record than most of that venerable spot’s output. It’s a big, fat, heavy sound for a duo, like a gaggle of bigfoots splashing around in the swamp.
The title track’s footwear statement is spot on. You’d need cement shoes to walk around in these gents’ footprints deeply embedded in concrete.
No neophytes to this ground-shaking energy, Mullins and Tapp are on their fifth recorded outing together since their 2014 debut, A Cold Wet Night and a Howling Wind. Their latest is fraught with peril, from health issues to affairs of the heart gone wrong. Diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer in 2009, Tapp was told he had six months to live, but after a year and a half of radiation and chemo, he survived to stomp and wail once again.
He doesn’t dwell on his illness here — the bulk of the material concerns heart unhealthy-ness of the romantic persuasion. But he does take a passing swipe at other bodily ills on “Hard Times,” a feverish love-induced, death-wish drama that has him walking under ladders and stepping on cracks to bring on his impending doom, his bad luck so crappy that even black cats avoid him.
The video for “Prosecution Blues” looks like a trailer for a 1950s horror movie, promising to blow your mind and possibly your lunch, but the horror here is Tapp threatening to charge his ex-beloved with heartache in the first degree.
The “In the Night Time” video throws up another ’50s-era creep show theme with a soundtrack reminiscent of Omar and the Howlers’ “Hard Times In The Land of Plenty” period.
There’s lots of good stuff to look at and listen to here, plenty of room left in the bigfoot tracks to stomp and holler along, muddying up your listening space ’til you’re free once more someday to do it in front of ’em, live and in person.
