Album:
Minnesota Snow EP
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 11:29
Size: 26.3 MB
Styles: Swamp blues
Year: 2015
Art: Front
[4:53] 1. Minnesota Snow
[2:25] 2. Stubb's Yard
[4:10] 3. Codename Toad
They know the mystery of a song's mood brings about a sense of place. The song Minnesota Snow is such a song. You can feel the threat. The menace of blizzard winds. A blizzard of snow, or a tempest of violence? Or both. You're the witness. "Let out some air from the tires, rock it back and forth, Needles on empty, heater's on full." That's a place nobody wants to be in, on-the-verge of lost desperation. All you can do is hope and pray you didn't really fuck it all up this time. It's an apt M.O. for most Mudlow songs. The world is gone shit side up y'all, but it ain't gonna always be that way baby, and it ain't ever gonna be without the boogie. It's nothing without that Mudlow style.
Let's take it down to Stubb's Yard. This is where Mudlow drives us through their North Mississippi, their Texas, their Detroit demolition. This is high steppin', steel-toe sliding, finger tracing, hand clappin', face-slappin' downtown rock city boogie music. At 2:28 it's the shortest song of the three, but that's all it needs.
The third joint of this set is Codename Toad. Something untoward is going on but hell, nothing's illegal until you get caught, right? It's a dirty rockin' thing having something to do with guns (a walnut grip Baretta by name) a mohair suit, a clear pint, plenty of cocaine, some weed and a shootout. It sounds like a breakneck, backroad trip from Peacehaven to Small Dole, down Devil's Dyke Road, to Shoreham and Saltdean. Listening to side one of ZZ Top's Tejas loud on repeat, taking that last midnight run...praying...Mr. State Trooper...
Minnesota Snow EP mc
Minnesota Snow EP zippy
Album:
Sawyer's Hope
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 42:00
Size: 96.2 MB
Styles: Rock, Dirty blues
Year: 2012
Art: Front
[4:09] 1. Fetlock
[4:30] 2. Catalina And The Cane Toad
[3:29] 3. Dust
[4:10] 4. Damn Your Eyes
[6:24] 5. Phantoms In The Rain
[3:41] 6. Zane Merite
[3:40] 7. The Jester
[2:37] 8. No Use
[4:22] 9. Soil
[4:53] 10. Evol
Thomas Wolfe wrote that “...our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cut-purse went unhung.” If that sliver of catholic prose had a soundtrack it would be played by Brighton UK’s Mudlow. Mudlow plays literate southern music without continent, drifting and fraught with terroir. It is at once humid, torrid, and familiar; a wholly indecent sound. It’s the grist, gristle and grit of the hard luck life. Noir skies meet muddy boots. The old trouble.
Tobias plays guitar, howls and sings, winks like Popeye and writes songs. The stalwart Matt plays drums, craftsman Paul Beat plays bass and records the music. Sullen sweetheartist Trimble blows the saxophone.
Named for a particular island off the western edge of downtown South Purgatory, sitting hard by a slow-burning swamp just down the road from the old General Tire factory (long abandoned). Port-side stands a tough and brazen little burlesque bar, lit like a set from Twin Peaks. It’s there, downstairs, framed by smoke-rimed red velvet curtains that Mudlow swing their craft. They play cool, cruel and criminal, lounged and louched versions of Frank’s Wild Years at The Stooges Funhouse for love-worn ghosts, sinewy butchers and Gutter Twins, as a sway-backed barmaid, mouth full of gold and skin scented of hyssop, serves marked cards and moonshine to lost North Sea sailors, southern kings, and their curs. Their music is the soundtrack for a film as yet unimagined, the saxophoned theme to a tempest-tossed and dreamless sleep. Night hues meet dawn of day in salt air and sea light. A morphine blues follows a sloe gin waltz. ~Rick Saunders
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