Heavy Souls - Until You're Mine (2014)

Although they’ve been kicking up dust clouds for less than a year, St Austell power duo Heavy Souls have already managed to spread their superdense blues particles an impressive distance into the stratosphere. Comprised of Phil Dolbear (drums, percsussion) and Guy Harandon (guitar, vocals), they subscribe to the unpretentious approach to playing and recording that (often by necessity) typified many of their primal blues influences.

Recorded shortly after their collaboration took wing, ‘Until You’re Mine’ provides evidence of the way in which this no-frills approach has already borne alluring fruit. “It was all pretty rapid. Most of it is good old garage blues stuff about relationships and drinking.” explains Phil. “For the album we wanted an unproduced and raw sound so we recorded everything live. Most of it was done on the first take … some of it wasn’t. We just wanted an album that we could play live without loads of faff and effects. No clever autotune or overdubbing drum waffle.”

The resultant fourteen track album (which also includes an additional two acoustic bonus renderings of ‘Old No. 7’ and ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’’) is something of a blues bonanza. After being bumped and ground onto the Devil’s highway by throbbing opener ‘Fun Loving Girl’, the disc gathers impetus through ‘Can’t Get Enough’, a lusty funk-infused blues adorned by Guy’s understated vocal. However, despite their adherence to the blues gospel, there is more than adequate diversity here: ‘Fifteen Minutes’ detonates as a jagged shard of coruscating garage rock that marries heavy psych elements to the sixties punk template to create a track that recalls the Small Faces at their heaviest.

Dolbear’s rhythm riot propels ‘Your Love’ through the gate kicked open by Sandy Nelson almost five decades ago, as a dizzying miasma of whirling psych rams the track into the subsequent ‘Backstabber’ – a minimum R’n’B, beat-driven recountment of the kind of betrayal many of us can empathise with, propelled onward by rhythms that ultimately reduce to a sub-sonic pulse. ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’’, the duo’s interpretation of rural pioneer Hambone Willie Newbern’s 1929 cut, ‘Roll and Tumble Blues’, emerges as a mighty slide infused rendition that enables Harandon to unleash his holler to fine effect.

The choppy, energized barroom romp of ‘Old No.7’ and the sparsely tactile ‘Delicious’ provide further indication of the variety of texture Heavy Souls are capable of weaving, while the understated ‘Evil (Is Going On)’ adds agreeable intricacies to the rolling boxcar template. ‘Original Sin’ sees jams kicked out amid Vincebus eruptions as the album develops a more visceral edge that takes dirty, urgent garage and dares it to play chicken in the crosstown traffic. Similarly thermaturge, ‘Got Nothing To Lose’ is a boiling broth of desire that expands into a hot pool of womanneed thanks to a nicely barbed selection of hooks.

‘Tea With Sugar’ provides the album’s vertex – a surefire banger that employes deceptive, effective simplicity to define a riotous, primal R’n’B throwdown that directs its power with pinpoint accuracy. After an affectionately rendered version of the Lightnin’ Hopkins classic ‘Shotgun Blues’, ‘Sweet To Sour’, brings the album home emphatically with an authentic dustbowl rumble, artfully embellished with slide and harp. Much like the band themselves ‘Until You’re Mine’ doesn’t make a fuss – it simply shows up, plugs in and detonates. But then, there is little that Heavy Souls need to say – the album does that for them.