Sweet Baby James & Rob Eyers - Double Voodoo Blues

Black Market Music

www.sweetbabyblues.com

13 tracks/48:22

Musical duos featuring a guitarist and drummer have created quite a stir in recent years. The White Stripes and Black Keys parlayed the stripped-down format into rock star status. Other groups like Moreland & Arbuckle and combo of Cedric Burnside & Lightnin’ Malcolm have electrified blues lovers with their raw, down-home sound.

The latest entry into this genre comes to us from Adelaide, Australia. Sweet Baby James Weston handles the guitar and vocals while Rob Eyers maintains the rhythm on drums and percussion. Weston gets writer’s credit on several tracks and wrote the rest of the original material in collaboration with lyricist Georgia Mays.

Weston is a solid performer, able to generate a consistent rhythmic pulse on each track with his slashing guitar style. He mainly uses a slide on electric guitars but several cuts are done on acoustic guitar, like “Evil Tongue” with Weston doing some intricate fingerpicking. On “Hot Plate”, the lone instrumental track, Weston steps beyond the rhythm mode and showcases some of his skill as a soloist on electric guitar. But the majority of the time his guitar work stays confined to generating riffs without a lot of embellishment, as on the frantic “Come on Here”, which copies the Mississippi hill country sound.

When it comes to the vocal element, Weston has a good, clean tone and enough range to easily handle the demands of the material. One highlight is “No Love”, with the singer wringing plenty of emotion from the description of a no-good woman accompanied only by his piercing guitar licks. His energetic vocal on “Thunder From the Sky” makes that steady-rolling’ track another highlight. “Trouble & Strife” is an acoustic number describing additional trouble with women that features more fine picking from Weston.

Eyers shows his versatility throughout the disc, whether pounding out the beat on the hard-driving “Getting Your Letters” or using brushes for the gently swinging rhythm on “Evil Tongue”. His spare accompaniment on “Refugee Child” does a lot with a cymbal and a tambourine.

At times, things drag a bit as Weston’s vocals don’t generate enough excitement to overcome the simple guitar patterns. Still, there are several memorable performances on the disc and it is a solid effort that this duo cab take pride in. It will be interesting to see if this release can capture some attention amidst the seemingly endless stream of recordings flooding the market these days.