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J. Roddy Walston's Gospel Glam 'n' Stomp

The piano rocker drops some essential business on his latest album.

Adrian Mack 12 Sep 2013TheTyee.ca

Adrian Mack contributes a regular music column to The Tyee and frequently sits behind Rich Hope.

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Where else do you take your Business between gas stations?

J. Roddy Walston cites Ian Stewart as an influence, so he obviously means business. That's Ian Stewart, the mostly anonymous (and late) sixth member of the original Stones lineup who was shunted off to the side of the stage for looking too much like a bus driver. He was also a monster boogie-woogie piano player, so it's only right that the current, keyboard-pounding saviour of chicken-fried gospel glam 'n' stomp should choose to honour him.

"He's as important to the Stones sound as Keith Richards," Walston told a journalist back in 2010, when J. Roddy Walston and the Business were kicking the door in with their self-titled second album. That record sounded like a honky tonk act from Tennessee visiting Top of the Pops in 1975, so in some sense the whole Stewart thing was nominal.

The point (I think) is that the British blues explosion that mutated from John Mayall to grown men in high heels -- all inside 10 years -- was being expertly sold back to us by an American kid in the 21st century.

New album Essential Tremors comes from the same alternate universe, especially on a track like "Tear Jerk" -- the closest thing here to the ecstatic barrelhouse rocker and almost-hit from 2010 "Don't Drop the Needle".

But Walston dials up the theatrical dementia on the song's bridge, and gets madder still on the gloriously unintelligible lead single "Heavy Bells" (the video considerately reveals the lyrics in all their southern-weird glory.) They've dialed up everything, in fact. Essential Tremors sounds bigger, warmer, roomier (check the drums on "Nobody Knows") than 2010's model.

Walston and the band have also tightened up the grooves on Essential Tremors with electrified soul numbers like "Take It As It Comes" or the androgynous, lipstick blues of "Black Light" (complete with Walston moaning, "Oooh, give us a kiss" about halfway through).

And while they're being even cheekier with the steals -- there's Zep in "Sweat Shock", T-Rex in "Marigold", any number of minor glitter bands in the thumping "Same Days" -- it's all in the service of a record that'll probably be remembered as their big breakthrough. Somewhere in the afterlife, Ian Stewart is frowning at all those minor chords.  [Tyee]

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