2024 – Forty Below
Records
Release Date : Sep. 20, 2024
By Phillip Smith; Sep. 21, 2024
Original source : phillycheezeblues.blogspot.com
I was very excited when I
first heard Luther Dickinson and J.D. Simo were going to
collaborate on an album together. I have been an avid follower of Luther’s for
quite a while, and became a fan of J.D.’s after catching a live
performance of him opening up for Tab Benoit last year. The two forces
first played together while touring with Phil Lesh and Friends. They
discovered they both had a lot of the same influences and musical alignments. Although
their approaches to playing guitar is vastly different, they found their styles
complemented each other very much so. Simo and Dickinson joined
forces, bringing drummer Adam Abrashoff onboard to complete the band and
recorded Do the Rump at Simo’s home studio in Nashville. The album has a strong hill-country blues presence.
It collides the familiar with the unfamiliar and slow-simmers the results in a
swampy goodness.
They pour a beautifully haunting groove into JJ Cale’s “Right Down There” from his 1972 album Really. With Abrashoff’s notorious beat laying the tracks, a lush dose of greasy slide guitar and heavy fuzz-laden guitar breathes a new glorious life into the song. “Lonesome Road” is downright amazing. It conjures images in my head of Hendrix and SRV playing together in a smoky, whiskey-soaked juke joint in the middle of Mississippi. I dig the John Lee Hooker cover of “Serve Me Right to Suffer”. Served in a bowlful of hypnotic North Mississippi hill country blues, it truly becomes an entirely different song. I find it fascinating to hear the results of mashing Junior Kimbrough’s “Do the Rump” and Fred McDowell’s “Louise” together and backed with a Fela Kuti-inspired afro-beat. “Do the Rump Louise”, a nearly eight-minute-long performance is quickly absorbed into my inner being. I love every bit of it. The album ends with an extraordinary extended ten-minute jam taking on R.L. Burnside’s “Peaches” for another healthy dose of music for the soul.
Do the Rump is everything I hoped this album would be and more. I truly hope to hear more musical collaborations between Simo and Dickinson.
For more information about J.D.
Simo, visit his website at simo.fm
For
more information about Luther Dickinson, visit his website at lutherdickinson.com
For
more information about Forty Below Records, visit their website at
fortybelowrecords.com
