Foto Recensie: Selwyn Birchwood - Pick Your Poison

Selwyn Birchwood  – Pick Your Poison
Format: CD / Label:  Alligator Records
Releasedatum: 19 mei 2017

Tekst: Iain Patience

Selwyn Birchwood is a relative newcomer to the blues scene but a guy who is fast making his mark with a growing trail of top-dollar albums under his belt since he picked up two major blues awards at the Blues Foundation’s IBC in Memphis back in 2013.

Last year, the South Florida band stepped up to the plate with their first professional-studio release on Chicago’s Alligator label with the popular, well-received ‘Don’t Call No Ambulance’, an album that also featured the fretwork of Joe Louis Walker in parts.

‘Pick Your Poison’ is the band’s second Alligator release and again features frontman Birchwood’s searing guitar-work, lap-steel slide-work and gritty, well-pitched vocals alongside thirteen tracks written by Birchwood himself. As a sophomore Alligator release, this album delivers more than its predecessor – no mean feat given the quality and strength of ‘Don’t Call No Ambulance’ itself. Indeed, if anything, ‘Pick Your Poison’ is a much more powerful, confident and self-assured offering, high-lighting the strength and power and purpose of Birchwood and the band members who all work flat-out together to produce an album that simply screams quality as it rips and roars along full of blues goodness with every turn and track.

This is a wonderful, soulful, southern bit of music, swampy, searching, stirring and full of excellent delivery, quality and class. ‘Pick Your Poison’ is well worth grabbing, for sure.

Tracklist:
01. Trial By Fire
02. Even The Saved Need Saving
03. Guilty Pleasures
04. Pick Your Poison
05. Heavy Heart
06. Haunted
07. Are Ya Ready?
08. Reaping Time
09. R We Krazy
10. Police State
11. My Whiskey Loves My Ex
12. Lost In You
13. Corporate Drone

Website: Selwyn Birchwood

 


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