BENJAMIN BOOKER - BENJAMIN BOOKER (ATO Records, 2014)
People regard the blues like they do barbecue, as regions set apart by their technique as much as their mythology. With Benjamin Booker, whose eponymous debut album was released this past August on ATO Records, the blues isn't so distinctly regional as it is an amalgamation of borrowed sounds, cherry-picked from the post-war and 1960s eras alongside infusions of punk, lo-fi, and garage rock. The result of this melting-pot varies with some musicians, but Booker's music is incredibly successful. You could make a meal of heavy riffs, gravel voice lyrics, or even the juke joint rhythms, which make the songs more than enough fun to groove to.
Booker started out experimenting with his music - inspired by the likes of T. Rex, The Gun Club, and Blind Willie Johnson - as a student in Gainesville, and continued with time in New Orleans and Tampa Bay sharpening his sound. Future fame was evident even before the release of the first record, playing gigs at the Newport Folk Festival, Austin City Limits, and Lollapalooza in 2013.
What's best about Booker's music is both how much, and how little, it resembles the blues genre. Popular imagination's drawing of a bluesman is a grisly sharecropper belting out self-indulgent laments about women and habit. Booker is young and energetic and while singing with an affected tone, speaks with a gentle voice. The trope has almost nothing to do with the themes of his music, which surround politics, religion, and the common existential cries of a twenty-something year old.
Where we feel the blues are the music's chord progressions and despairing tone. Rather than stale forms, though, we get Booker trying to aggressively run by the anguish or undercutting it with soft melodies. From the first track on the album "Violent Shiver," we're hit with a breathless Chuck Berry guitar riff. Furious chords give in to swelling cadences, swinging notes, and shuffled strums in songs "Always Waiting" and "Have You Seen My Son." We hear Booker's range on "I Thought I Heard You Screaming", a gentle hymn reminiscent of Asie Payton and Junior Kimbrough, as well as Jack White (Booker was pulled in as an opener for White's tour this year).
These songs were written without millions of Spotify and Youtube followers, and Booker has mentioned that his next endeavors will reflect the reality that people are interested in his music. Regardless of what this means for the direction of the sound he develops, we'll all still be listening. <TM>
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