TY FREEMAN – One Way Love
There’s no point in rebuilding the house from the ground up when the walls are sturdy and the roof ain’t looking like it’s going to start leaking anytime soon. That’s precisely what fans of classic rock think about this style of music, as it works to transition into the modern age. But if the sound does not require reinvention, where will new thrills come from?
The original blues and rock musicians were great despite not being allowed much time to get great. Most of them were out there chasing something that they ought to have left alone when they should’ve been rehearsing.
However, that adds additional pressure to modern blues-rock daredevils like Ty Freeman. They can’t just sound great (which Freeman does). Their music must also feel dangerous.
Thankfully, after a gentle introduction, Ty Freeman’s “One Way Love” develops into a stomping blues-rock that sounds like a locomotive flying loose on the tracks and sending people into a frenzy. The tricks may be old, but Freeman executes nearly all of them well and with confidence, while not forgetting to add some thrills to the mix.
Flashlight Faces – Under the Hammer
Ain’t it terrible to hear older people trying to convince you that their glory days were far more glorious than yours will ever get a chance to be? Ain’t it even worse when you realise that, probably, they’re right?
You ought to get your kicks quickly because they’re going fast and somebody’s just waiting to slam the door shut. In an economy dominated by shrinkflation, we can’t be naive enough to assume that music, and whatever it was that we liked about it, won’t be one of the things getting smaller and less important with each passing year. Flashlight Faces can’t pretend like they don’t remember.
There’s a good chance that the top pop stars of the world didn’t even get to hear their songs before they were asked to sing them. There’s an even bigger chance that soon, they won’t have to bother walking into the studio at all.
Flashlight Faces’ “Under the Hammer” sounds like a protest song for all the good people who got used to finding their hopes in songs, jokes or quick embraces. But where will all these people be pretty soon? Hopefully safe, but unlikely, to be able to get as much hope from the same things. “Under the Hammer” is a protest song against the powers changing the world, neither for the better nor for the worse, but rather toward the unimportant.
