Wisconsin-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and blues guitarist, JARED JAMES NICHOLS — famous for his shimmering guitar shapes, fizzed up rhythms and grit-fed voice that’s just the right-side of charcoaled bourbon — has returned with his new album “Black Magic.”
It’s released 27 October via Listenable Records and available on CD, Vinyl and as a download.
Recording was done at The Boneyard in Boston as well as Johnny Depp’s home studio in Los Angeles and produced and co-written by Tony Perry and Jared James Nichols.
The new album includes his current single “Last Chance” ( shared below) — it’s a maximum overdrive, full-tilt steamboat of a song with resonant guitars, electrifying riffs and more resistance than a hundred cresty stallions .
Over the past few years, Jared has built a solid reputation as a stunning blues rock act and has shared stages with ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Zaak Wylde, Glenn Hughes, Walter Trout, Blue Oyster Cult, UFO and Saxon.
We thought his last album, ‘Old Glory and the Wild Revival’ was filled with “melodic boogies & guitars that glide with silvery prospect & a voice as dry as the parched earth at Sand Creek.”
We had a listen to “Black Magic” :
“The Gun” is a heavy wowster and the first song recorded for the new album. It has cavernous depths and crispy pinches of sound with grainy vocals that collapses around the grated guitars. The lyric, inspired if not actually snatched from Ike & Tina Turner is rakish and überly groovy with distortions a-plenty. The number features reverberated bottle-neck and a whole lot of enthusiastic feverishness.
Dennis Holm (drums)+ Nichols (vocals, guitar) + Erik Sandin (bass, vocals) Photo Credit © Dustin Jack
Funky “Honey, Forgive Me” has a scandalous low-bass backbone and ever-clacking rhythms. The voice is hot ‘n’ spicy and the guitar is a cocktail of acids.
Southern rocker “Home” begins with a singing guitar. The bass notes are back-folded and the sentiment is carping, though there’s no trace of actual bitching.
The guitar on this becomes taller, more glacial, than the blue-snow on Rib Mountain, This is sensatialicious.
“Keep Your Light on Mama” has a footslogging vintage-blues beat and unremitting earthbound guitar rhythms.
The voice on this song is drier & more sun-baked than a Moore County bar during the ban.
For foot stomping deliverance and flamboyant guitar chemistry you don’t get much better than the tracks on this collection…
The baited hooks ‘n’ anchors are more catchy than a bunch of bear traps and richer than a beaver pelt. And the guitar solos come at you faster than spin-stabilized bullets.
The whole album is full of colours and expression and is almost psychedelic in nature.
File beside Montrose, West, Bruce and Laing, Chickenfoot
Words: @neilmach 2017 ©
Main Picture: Photo Credit © John Bull
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