After
catching The Rising Souls performing a short set at the Edinburgh Blues Club
the other week, I felt their debut mini-album from 2014 might be worth a
swatch. So here we have eight tracks
from the Edinburgh trio, spread over 24 minutes or so. And it has to be said that it’s an
encouraging effort. With Dave Archibald
on guitar and vocals, Roy ‘Kelso’ Laing on bass, and Tom Reed on box and
percussion, they manage to explore a variety of styles with a relatively limited
palette.
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Rising Souls, sitting down |
Opening
track ‘Don’t Say You Love Me’ is a woman-done-me-wrong protest with an air of
work song about its chorus, sung over a nagging bass line. It also manages to encompass an overt nod to
Marvin Gaye’s ‘Can I Get A Witness?’ The
following ‘Monster’, meanwhile, offers a contrastingly cool, jazzy piece of
soul, with a light touch on guitar and cleverly phrased vocals from Archibald
before he opens up with some urgency in the second half to insist to his girl
that “I’m on my way!”
The
following ‘Steady’ and ‘Fool In Time’ will inevitably provoke comparisons
between Archibald and Paolo Nutini, vocally.
On these songs Archibald’s singing has a slightly drawling, quavery
intonation, but the most significant point is that he doesn’t ‘Americanise’ his
vocals. ‘Man In Black’, meanwhile, adds
some mournful harp playing to the mix, to complement its halting, shimmering
arrangement.
Nutini
isn’t the only resemblance that springs to mind though. ‘Sorry That I Love You’ has a riff that
suggests a Stones demo, complemented by a vocal that suggests Jagger twitching
in anticipation of how he might deliver it live.
Closer ‘The
Boxer’ is more percussive, with a soulful chorus and some out of the ordinary,
jazzy guitar chords, vaguely reminiscent of Steely Dan, and here and there
conjuring up some faint, acoustic echoes of Foo Fighters’ ‘The Pretender’. But at the same time it’s a track that
ploughs its own rootsy, acoustic furrow.
Check out ‘The Boxer’ on Soundcloud here.
If this is
the instrumental framework The Rising Souls intend to work with in the future,
the challenge will be how to develop songs more fully, and in different
directions. But this is a more than
promising down payment for the full scale album they’re recording this summer.
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