BLACK DIAMOND HEAVIES: A Touch Of Someone Else's Class
Jun 12, 2008
By Eric Davidson

On their sophomore slab, this East Nashville, Tennessee, duo rambles across song structures and melodies that couldn't be any more traditional in that Southern, sweaty, bar-blues modus operandi. But the cake of gnarled organ and distorted drum stomp all over A Touch make this boogie-woogie wobble like a '75 Ford pickup on it's last, determined shocks about to stumble off a rocky cliff... on Mars. The red-lined production and cymbal screech add a whiff of fried futuro-robot burn like hit-period ZZ Top filtered through the current blues-duo format.

Gravel-throated singer James Leg harbors a demi-doom perhaps due to having to hold together everything but the drums. He may be the only current broken blues carnival barker who heard John Lee Hooker long before Captain Beefheart or Tom Waits, or Man Man for that matter, and has yet to use a beard as evidence of purity�"what with purity being something gutter boozers should rarely be concerned with. The razor-stabbed organ-fueled gutter-gospel, "Oh, Sinnerman," actually exudes some of the tempo meander of a rambling church sermon, but the sparse sound of a graveyard Bassholes kin.

Yes, smoky Hammond organ ballads like "Bidin' My Time" are trotted out, loose "baby"s are pleaded upon continuously, and a humid tone over heated tunes is preferred. In general, such blues hammering is best served to a greener crowd not completely sick of this style from exposure to a decade of '80s beer commercials. But mucho credit is given to these Heavies for retaining that storming, redlining fuzz to the point of something like a new kick. Especially on "Solid Gold" where the organ playing starts to whoosh in unexpected corners of the song, cymbals crash like garbage can tops, and for a few moments you forget you've heard this all before. Or maybe you haven't.