Review: 'bLOW' by Colin Linden

Photo: Colin Linden by Laura Goodwin

By Conrad Warre

Award-winning blues powerhouse, Colin Linden, is set to release his new album bLOW, on September 17 via the Nashville-based Thirty Tigers, and it is the first release under Lucinda Williams’ imprint Highway 20 Records. Although bLOW is Linden’s fourteenth album in forty years, it’s his first electric blues album. He has played on over 500 albums and produced 140, including being awarded a Grammy for producing Keb’ Mo’s album Oklahoma. A nine-time Juno Award winner, 25-time Juno Award nominee, Linden was the main contributor to the music for the “Nashville” TV show, and the Coen Brothers featured his music in “O’ Brother Where Are Thou.”

Colin Linden’s history is the stuff of legends. At 11 years old, he was mentored by none other than the great bluesman, Howlin’ Wolf, after meeting him at a matinee show in Toronto’s Colonial Tavern.

A Canadian guitarist, songwriter and record producer, Linden has worked with Bob Dylan, Bruce Cockburn, Lucinda Williams, T-Bone Burnett, Emmylou Harris, Greg Allman, John Prine, Leon Redbone, Rita Chiarelli, Chris Thomas King, The Band and many more.

Linden’s musical resume is deep and wide. bLOW features the powerful mix of blues, rock and roots style he is known for. The band is comprised of Linden on vocals, guitar, slide guitar, and lifelong collaborators Gary Craig on drums and John Dymond on bass. The trio hails from Toronto and they refer to themselves as the Rotting Matadors. Six of the musical tracks were originally instrumentals composed for inclusion on the ABC television show ‘Nashville’ until Linden decided they merited being explored as songs with original lyrics.

The grooves in these tracks are simple, pure, emotive and unadorned. You can imagine the musicians cutting them on a warm Mississippi evening, fireflies blinking, sitting on crates of moonshine and drinking cold beer. John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley and Howlin’ Wolf haunt the songs like prowling ghosts and the deft and lean instrumentation drifts between the chitlin’ circuit and the earliest Chicago electric blues.

bLOW is flush with sound that came before blues musicians and their producers advanced recording ‘technology’. You won’t find a wah pedal on these tracks, let alone a synthesizer. There’s a lot of confidence in delivering these songs without unnecessary overdubs or doubled guitars, with spare background vocals and no studio effects. It’s musically refreshing and keeps the listener’s focus on the driving groove and lyrics.

bLOW contains eleven tracks and there isn’t a filler or a B side among them. All seem to finish too soon. The album opens with “4 Cars” which kickstarts the songs with the impression of a car chase late at night somewhere between Oklahoma and Texas. Bo Diddley is driving the lead car while Linden and his band follow behind at breakneck speed, skidding around hairpin bends. “4 Cars” has Linden on slide guitar and vocals, singing “I’m getting rolled like a pair of dice, Squeezed to the teeth like white on rice, Held underwater like a saved soul, 4 cars speeding to the same crossroads” It’s a blues-boogie led a by full-throttled slide guitar on the edge of distortion accompanied by rattling drums slack-tuned for the heat of the summer.

Listen to “4 Cars’

‘Ain’t No Shame,’ ‘Boogie Let Me Be,’ the title track ‘Blow,’ ‘Right Show Wrong Foot,’ ‘Houston’ and ‘Until The Heat Leaves Town’ all deliver on the alligator-kicking swamp lust of mid-tempo blues with the rhythm section locking horns with the devil. This band could bring the walls down at a rodeo. ‘Don’t Come Without Pain’ delivers a calculated transition from the raucous boogie to a slow twelve-bar blues. The understated guitar parts here lead the listener to a glorious slide development, and to one of the rare instances when the production wrangles the guitar tones with phasing and flanging. The song includes some nice hard-picking near the bridge and fast volume swells – a brief master class from Linden on how to extract all the possible tones out of an electric guitar.

The Gospel nuanced ‘When I Get to Galilee’ utilizes parallel voice and slide guitar in sublime combination, while the occasional almost invisible organ lays low underneath the chorus.

The closing track: ‘Honey on My Tongue’ could have fallen on the cutting room floor of the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” sessions. It’s a beautiful mid-tempo rocker featuring slide guitar and harmonica in tandem.

The album was produced and mixed by Colin Linden at Blackbird Studio and Pinhead Recorders in Nashville. If you dig sincere, analog, authentic blues and foot-stomping boogie you’re going to like this album – a lot.