Saturday, April 30, 2011

Farrell Jackson - Lucky Day

Hear The Track Here


I am a man of many biases. (Ed: sounds nasty, go see the Doc) The mountains of prejudice I have been known to build up towards certain musical spheres is in marked contrast to my welcome for work of a more rock nature. I am, by instinct and training, a rock animal through and through and if there is anywhere that is more liable to intense scrutiny, I would be hard pressed to say. See, I grew up as this template was being made and cut my musical teeth on the genre (albeit in a extremely Gilmore-like way), so if you are not going to spend the time getting it right, it's not going to get through to me. Mixposure has been a particularly rich website for these kinds of musicians and Farrell Jackson stands tall on that site and rightly so.

As good as Farrell is in his solo work, his collaborations are nothing less than excellent and IMO is where I heard some of his best work. On Lucky Day he is joined by one of my favourite rock guitarists Joseph Rodriguez, whose lead playing is extraordinarily good in that time honoured burn-the-house-down rock style so beloved of old rock farts like me. Joseph supplied the music and Farrell supplied the vocals, lyrics, harmonica (yeah!) and melodies and a wonderful rock experience it is too. See the other thing about good tracks, for me anyway, is that they have to actually have a strong song attached to all that macho bullshit...errr...sorry...meant to say artistic posturing.

Songwriting, as it happens, is one of Farrell's strengths, and Lucky Day is a peach, full of rich harmonies, redemptive lyrics and a performance so powerful the wind blows your hair gently as the track roars through the speakers. A lot of that power comes, also, through the auspices of Joseph Rodriguez who is one of the most incendiary players I have ever heard. The man can rock in a way that is both retro and refreshingly modern and when you chain all these things together with a tight production, you come up with a track that doesn't just say it's a rock track. It pounds you in the face to let you know it has come to town. Even despite my overwhelming bias here, this is still a masterful track.

MUST HAVE red-hot rock.

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