From the opening bars of “The Healer”, you just know. You just know.
There is slide guitar that would make Rich Robinson blush (more from him later), a roar from Megan Kane that recalls Janis Joplin and lashings of Hammond organ. All right, I’m in. In truth, you can’t fail to be if you love rock ’n’ roll.
Parker Barrow’s Hold The Mash EP arrived last winter and was an absolute beauty – as the Maximum Volume review said at the time, it sounded like a fresh start for the Nashville band. The eagle-eyed might therefore spot something familiar about this full-length version.
Essentially, it takes those five songs and adds four more. When the original material was this good, though, nobody should be complaining.
The first addition is the righteous stomp of “Blinded”. Maximum Volume favourites Thunder made a career out of this sort of thing: bluesy hard rock with a huge groove, an even bigger chorus and enough swagger to fill whatever room it enters. There is a knowing confidence about Kane when she sings, “Hope you brought your shades, honey?” Purely and simply, it is utterly glorious.
“Nothin’ Left To Save” is another newcomer, and its chorus might require an inoculation before exposure. It lodges itself in your brain immediately, powered by thick guitars and a performance from Kane that underlines just what an extraordinary voice she possesses. Soulful, rough-edged and capable of cutting through everything around it, she sounds like she was born to front a rock ’n’ roll band.
The other two new pieces arrive towards the end. “Ruby’s Reckoning” begins with sensational back-porch acoustics before morphing into a riot of rollicking piano that sounds as though it has escaped from a New Orleans speakeasy. Like much of Hold The Mash, it has one foot in rock history without ever seeming trapped by it.
The album rounds itself out with a personal favourite of mine. And if you are going to dare to take on The Black Crowes, you had better come heavy.
Parker Barrow are not remotely fazed by “My Morning Song”, originally found on the Crowes’ second record, The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion. Indeed, their version becomes an eight-minute demonstration of precisely how good this band are. The closing solo is perfection, while the extended jam feels loose, spontaneous and entirely natural rather than self-indulgent.
Then comes the moment when Kane takes the lines, “And if your soul is let go / Oh, you never know, no, you never know,” and sings them as though possessed. You sense that the song lives somewhere deep within her. That alone might tell you everything you need to know about Parker Barrow.
Hold The Mash is anything but a hangover from the earlier EP. Instead, it feels like the same party becoming an even bigger session, with four additions that fit so seamlessly that you wonder how they were ever missing.
Parker Barrow have the songs, the musicianship, the confidence and one of the finest voices around. Here is your proof.
Rating: 9/10
