Alfie Smith - Every Rome Needs A Nero (2024) Hi-Res

Alfie Smith is something of a local legend in his hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, having been nominated 12 times in the Hamilton Music Awards, in both the Best Male Vocalist and Best Guitarist categories. He also represented the Toronto Blues Society at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis in 2010. Every Rome Needs A Nero is Smith’s eighth album, his first since 2014’s Come On In My Kitchen, and it’s a little gem of a release.

With a warm and weathered voice and a muscular, restrained (but emotionally charged) approach to the guitar (primarily vintage Nationals and Gibsons), the eight self-written tracks and two choice covers on Every Rome Needs A Nero successfully straddle that blues/folk/roots divide inhabited by the likes of Chris Smither. This is no “singer with an acoustic guitar” album, however. Backed by an ace band of Dave Gould on drums and percussion, Justine Fischer on bass, Troy Dowding on trumpet, Jesse O’Brien on piano, Brandon Bliss on Wurlitzer and B3 and Melissa Marchese and Jenni Pleau on backing vocals, Smith’s songs take center stage. Bliss’s day job is as the keyboardist for the rock band, Monster Truck, and Every Rome… was masterfully mixed and engineered by Bliss at Monster Truck’s studio. There is a rawness and rare depth to the album that adds to the overall enjoyment.

The eponymous title track kicks things with finger picked blues guitar meshing superbly with Dowding’s mournful trumpet, leading swiftly into “East End Girl”, which with its haunting slide guitar sounds like an out-take from an early Dire Straits album if Bruce Springsteen was guesting on vocals. The New Orleans-styled country blues “All The Blues I Need” is a re-recording of a track that previously featured on Come On In My Kitchen, which again benefits from Dowding’s superb trumpet, while Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree” features one of Smith’s deepest vocal performances. “Time Is A Rocketship” has the great couplet “If you don’t learn from the past, it’ll come back and kick your ass” as well a hypnotic slide guitar lick that drives the verse.

Smith has a poet’s ear for a sharp lyric, as on the gentle “Stupid Fool”, where he sagely advises the listener to “keep your head down, you stupid fool” as he imparts wisdom on how to listen without necessarily having to fix the problem.

The set closes out with a heartfelt, slide-driven cover of Leonard’s Cohen classic “Bird On A Wire”, on which O’Brien’s delicate piano and Dowding’s muted trumpet emphasize the pain and regret in Smith’s vocal performance.

Every Rome Needs A Nero is a very enjoyable release from Alfie Smith that offers something different from the majority of modern blues releases. Warmly recommended.