There is a reason why the twelve-bar blues format has never gone out of fashion. It gets the job done, and it gets it done brilliantly. It is simple (yet not simplistic), versatile, supple, and instantly recognisable. Its three-chord structure is comfortably familiar, and its repetitive style strikes the perfect balance between predictable sonic anticipation and the welcome release. (I say!!)
But enough of the boring academia, if you really want to understand this classic musical form, you really need to hear it in action, and if you are going to do that, you might as well give “Oh Denise” a spin, the latest single from Ken Woods and The Old Blue Gang. After all, it is about as good as the style gets.
Sitting somewhere between the squaling sound of Austin, Texas’ most rock and roll blues brethren – from Stevie Ray Vaughan to Gary Clark Jr and the UK’s own raucous, R&B inspired pub rock scene of way back when, Howling Woods (as nobody except me calls him, maybe it’ll catch on) gives us everything perfect about the classic blues groover.
It blends fun and finesse, vim and virtuosity, groove and grit, muscle and melody, everything that makes this perhaps the perfect musical form…or at least one that can hold its own until the perfect musical form does come along.
But who’d have thought that you’d find such incendiary and authentic blues salvo lurking in a small Welsh town on the western shore of the Severn Estuary? But then, blues isn’t a genre or a scene, it’s an attitude, a state of mind.
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