Ida Mae - Chasing Lights (2019) Hi Res

Talk about an artist having a natural gift that defies their age and appearance. Ida Mae’s Chris Turpin has a voice that doesn’t just sound a little lived in, it has the kind of sandpaper roughness that normally only develops after decades spent on the road. A life lived from joint to joint, no place to call home but a roadhouse and a dimly lit stage. And the way he plays a guitar, it’s the kind of wizardry you associate with those that have been down to the crossroads and done a trade-off with the devil. But while they may reside in the US today, Chris and fellow Ida Mae pilot Stephanie Jean hail from the Norfolk city of Norwich where rumours of devilish under-the-counter deals are rather thin on the ground amongst the take-out lattes and hipster scooters populating the train station these days. Still, to say the Turpin voice doesn’t match the youthful appearance of the man does understate matters. However, he does look every inch the rock star. Not just any old rocker either, in fact to me he resembles a young Steve Marriott. No massive claim but consider this; Chris can match the late Marriott for raw guttural hollering and sugar rush adrenaline so folks we really should sit up and pay attention. This pair have paid their dues for the last ten years on duty with their blues-rock indie band Kill It Kid. But Stephanie seemed to spend her entire time in that band with a disdainful scowl in her eye, as if she was thinking to herself “I’ve got so much more than this in the tank, just you wait and see”.

So, from the ashes of Kill It Kid, Ida Mae now step forward. Just as the former band flagged up influences by naming themselves after a Blind Willie McTell song, so too does the Ida Mae moniker come from an earlier period; a Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee tune which was the first they ever harmonized on. This was the music that inspired the young Chris Turpin in the first place. If you cast your mind back fifteen years or so, the English scene was in the midst of a new wave of bands who had garage band sonics in their sound and blues testaments in their words. Like any true aficionado, Chris wanted to go back and check out the source. Luckily by this time, out-of-copyright early twentieth-century music could be acquired in bulk very quickly and affordably at the local music shop, so the fishing expedition leads him to complete catalogues of Blind Willie and Robert Johnson. That’s when the light went on for the fledgeling guitarist. For Stephanie, the path was different and yet almost parallel to Chris’. She had grown up surrounded by the great female Jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald and early blues style vocalists such as Bessie Smith; also, contemporary artists like Diana Krall were enjoying a new Jazz mainstream revival. Stephanie got herself on the live circuit singing old time Jazz numbers just as Chris was an open-mic addict playing the acoustic blues he’d fallen so heavily for. Soon enough, their paths crossed and spotting a kindred spirit on the other side of the genre fencing, he approached Stephanie to sing with him. One major label indie band career later, they are now romantically linked too and have finally earned the right to make the music they were meant to.

The problems that beset many an indie band tied to a mainstream record label eventually felled Kill It Kid. Bands end up being pulled so far from the directions they want to move in that before long, everything snaps apart. Those that get on board the train with sincere intentions though, will always find a way to reach their destination. Chris and Stephanie gave themselves the six months of time suddenly stretching out ahead to turn the Ida Mae project into a reality. Seizing the chance to finally make music pumping through their DNA the pair got down to some frenetic writing and demoing. Chris has since explained that “we wanted to make something simple, honest and raw. We wanted to make a record our way, with no compromises”.

The resulting debut album that I am listening to today is irrefutable evidence that talented artists should be given license to follow their vision. That said, the years of nurturing and un-spoken planning that preceded it may well have served them well. The album is confident in its execution and urgent in its desire to be noticed. To that end, the decision to collaborate with esteemed producer Ethan Johns looks like a calculated masterstroke. One of his greatest assets is an ability to capture the spontaneous magic that often gets forgotten amidst early studio run-throughs. He’s not after audio perfection, more like something authentic which is exactly what this music needs. But the sonics he injects are potent. Look to opening track ‘Boom Boom Boom’ for the finest example of this. It’s a pounding blues rocker, the kind that really grabs your attention and doesn’t loosen its grip. But just when you think you’ve got a handle on the song’s direction, there’s a moments pause before a shuddering fuzz guitar freak-out launches us into the stratosphere. It turns out to be the finger work of Dweezil Zappa, a studio guest whose involvement must have sent Stephanie’s jazz radar into the danger zone! But it speaks volumes to the credibility this duo command from their peers that heavy duty names such as this want to paint on their canvas.

There’s plenty more where that came from, ‘My Girl Is A Heartbreak’ keeps pushing the volume to 11 as it grinds out its dirty, scuzzy chops and Stephanie’s pure harmonies offset the exhaust-fume growl coming from Chris’s larynx. This stuff is smoky. The boy’s got more than one pitch with his vocals however, in fact back in the Kill It Kid days the singing was occasionally a thing of pure tonal warmth. It’s on the slow-motion title track ‘Chasing Lights’ that Turpin softens delightfully but that’s not the only notable element here. Halfway in the most unreasonably gorgeous sounding synth chord progressions take the song to yet another dimension. It’s the kind of fusion between old and new sounds that only sounds easy and obvious when its executed with this kind of technical mastery. The surprises continue through ‘Higher Than The Light’, a track whose backbone cannot be naturally identified to the naked ear; it’s something like a psychedelic sitar, the kind of pulsating space noise that Jimmy Page would have been proud to put his name to. Shades of light and dark abound; through ‘Easily In Love’ where personal sentiments avoid sickliness pitfalls and onto ‘Feel Them Getting Closer’ which feels like the precursor to a bar brawl. The attention to detail is charming too, like the field recordings of bird songs they recorded at Robert Johnson’s grave used as an intro to ‘Rightfully Honestly’. Every stroke has been applied with care ensuring the album stands up as a credible work of musical art. This is the kind of debut collection that goes all out to prove itself; it has done just that and then some. Ida Mae are definitely here to stay.