The Hoax - Recession Blues: A Tribute To B.B. King (2014)

The Hoax are back, continuing their return as a band with a second album since the reformation. With Recession Blues the band are doing something a little different, eschewing the hard hitting contemporary style that has always been their trademark and replacing it with something a little more traditional.The subtitle of the disc is “A Tribute to BB King”, which reveals their intentions and, to a certain extent, what to expect without making a fuss about it. It is what the title says, a tribute to possibly the greatest ever blues musician, made up from the band’s take on their hero’s material.
It’s in the material that the first surprises begin to offer themselves up. BB King has been performing for a long time, and his career has spanned many different stylistic approaches, and the number of hit records he’s imprinted on blues consciousness is massive. On the album for every You Upset Me Baby there’s an A Blind Love. They aren’t just playing the hits, and they aren’t even taking on the later songs from the Thrill Is Gone era, instead it’s a cross section of songs from when BB was at his peak, young and fiery, melodramatic and driven in a way that is almost the opposite of his later work.
The sound of the album owes a lot to early BB too. Upright bass, Hammond organ and a horn section have been added to the band’s core and the recording sounds like it was made on tape with the faders well in the red, with the musicians performing in a room as a band. In a sense it’s less polished and constructed than past albums, but it’s more exciting, more cohesive and grooving than they’ve ever been. Care has obviously been taken to honour the approach of the originals, and in the arrangements too there’s a quality that is very much akin to the source.
If you play a BB King song, especially if you do it with an arrangement that echoes the original, it can be very tempting to regurgitate BB King guitar licks or to ape his singing style. That’s not what the band have done, yes Hugh sings a bit more belting falsetto than he normally would, but it’s still his voice and phrasing, and Jon and Jesse are playing their own style of guitar. It makes it more than a pastiche, more than just a tribute in name. It’s the band playing the music that inspires them, and the honour they pay BB and the material by being true to themselves as much as they are to the source is the greater for it.
This may not be the Hoax as you know them, and in fact some fans might wish to put this disc aside for not fitting with their own personal image of the band. However for me this is the best record they’ve made, it’s not just that I too love BB and the material, but the fact they’re obviously having more fun than they normally do in the studio and it comes across on the record in no uncertain terms. This is the best tribute you could offer BB King, to make a record of really exciting music that combines emotions and fun to raise a smile on the face of the musician and the listener. It’s what BB would have done.