Marcus King - Young Blood (2022) Hi-Res

New mainstream rock music today seems to need models to emulate. Like Joe Bonamassa and others before him, Marcus King—with help from producer Dan Auerbach—has chosen Billy Gibbons riff rock as a style and sound worth following. Even more than most Gibbons worshippers, King has clearly spent time listening to ZZ Top's 1973 masterpiece Tres Hombres. It's evident King is both paying tribute and copping inspiration with his riff at the center of "Lie Lie Lie," not to mention bassist Nick Movshon's dirty tone and Chris St. Hillaire's fierce drumming on "Precious and Grace." King makes it clear in the album's notes that he and Auerbach were focused on the ZZ Top that played stadiums in the mid-'70s. "Dan and I wanted to create a record with a big arena rock sound we don't really hear a lot now. We wanted tunes that were as big as the rooms we wanted to play." With a passable voice and convincing skills on his 1959 Les Paul, King even catches some of the lumbering riffage of Black Sabbath in the snaky ballad, "Aim High." With the vocal reverb and the easy-going choruses, "Hard Working Man" lifts the aural signature of another icon of the era, the Steve Miller Band. The '70s homages don't all work. A tune like "Whisper" which could be a Bad Company or Lynyrd Skynyrd outtake, takes no chances and does little to advance King's vision. This is riff rock so words are of lesser importance. Without a mention of Bob Dylan, "Blood on the Tracks," where Auerbach adds the distinctive sound of the mellotron, King reaches, "Sunrise blazin' ahead of me/ On the edge of heaven and hell/ Freedom's gonna feel like amphetamines/ Ringin' like the Liberty Bell." To his and Auerbach's credit, Young Blood was cut in six days: "These songs are live performances. The whole damn thing is live—the solos and everything. It's so rare in this day and age." Closing with the strongest number, the bluesy southern rocker "Blues Worse Than I Ever Had," the enjoyable if predictable Young Blood draws heavily from another age, raising the question of when King's own style will begin to emerge.