black midi present their third album and second in two years, Hellfire. Hellfire sees the London three piece at their most direct. Written in isolation in London in 2021 almost immediately after it’s predecessor Cavalcade - no band can quite build their own universe like black midi. Hellfire picks up right where Cavalcade left off. Where Schlagenheim was much more based on ‘jams’ and collaboration, Cavalcade a mixture of isolation and collaboration, Hellfire falls on the other side of the spectrum of working in isolation.
Joe Louis Walker can play guitar and that’s the truth. The Chicago-based blues singer has been a presence on that city’s music scene for decades now, releasing albums on an almost annual basis since the late 1980s. Alibums such as 1990’s Gift and 2003’s Between a Rock and the Blues reveal a musician with serious guitar chops as well as a gospel-tinged megaphone of a voice. Never a purist, Walker is unafraid to incorporate plenty of rock and roll and even a little funk into his arrangements. Hellfire is Walker’s first album for the blues standard-bearers over at Alligator Records, and the set is a knockout, showcasing a wide variety of approaches unified by his incendiary guitar throttling and those expressive, angst-ridden vocals.
On his latest set for Rock-A-While Records, he joins forces with another powerhouse fretburner, Jim McCarty, who honed his chops with, among others, Mitch Ryder And The Detroit Wheels and The Buddy Miles Experience. They wanted another A-lister on vocals so they could concentrate on six-stringin’, and made a wise choice in Dan Devins, who doubles down on harp. With three of the five pieces firmly in place, the fivesome is completed by Mike Marshall on bass, and Dave Marcaccio on drums. These guys crank out blues the same way Kenny cranked out Caddys on that Cadillac assembly line back in the day, playing in the clubs at night.