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Daddy Long Legs - Liars, Cheats & Scoundrels

Busted Flat Records

Time-52:00

www.daddylonglegs.ca

Out of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada comes a crunching, powerful force driven by punk-like energy in the form of Daddy Long Legs. A guitar, harmonica, bass and drums outfit without any outside help creates a joyful and intent noise. Only three songs of all originals qualify as blues. The rest is mostly of the rough, riff-driven variety. Something like the love-child of The Fabulous Thunderbirds and Black Sabbath. The guitar and harmonica throw the riffs back and forth. Guitarist-vocalist Mike Elliot has the right shop-worn, gravelly voice for the task at hand, and his guitar assault can be deadly. Junior Mallick’s harmonica work can be bluesy and/or rock-riff driven. Add a heavy drummer and a solid bass player and you’re in for a taste of the kind of rock music that restarts your heart and shoots the wax out of your ear canals. This should make for great cruising music.

The boys get right down to business with “Almost Crazy”. You just have to love a lyric like-“The voices in my head say that I’m doing just fine”. The harmonica along with guitar drives the monster riff home. For a curveball, the next song up is the hyped-up blues shuffle that is “Never Home”, were Junior gets the opportunity to tear off some wild harp riffs, followed by super-charged guitar. The vocals throughout the record are gritty and forceful, but highly intelligible, unlike heavy metal. “Better Men” “ups” the level on the “crunch-rock-o-meter”. The slow harmonica fueled blues of “What You Need” comments on life’s necessities-“No heart-shaped pool with a swim-in tiki bar”. A cut-to-the-quick blues-rock guitar solo closes it out. The tough and meaty riff of “Built To Last” will burn itself into the inner reaches of your brain. “Scream And Cry” offers more in a similar vein. The walloping drumming of Jeff Wagner propels the loping “Sleepwalker”. “There’s no point being good, if you’re the only one” is the sentiment expressed in “Have A Little Fun”. They even have a bit of a protest song railing against media manipulation and politics in “Had Enough”. The last “song” is the hidden track called “Kevin Doyle”, that is more of a brief rant of his name and “always a price to pay” over pounding drums, bass and screeching guitar. Must be an inside joke.

Needless to say the guys get the job done as a tight rockin’ unit. It’s all there-finely honed chops, heavy chords, top notch production values, the occasional humorous lyric and appropriately rough hewn vocals. If this wondrous concoction doesn’t spring clean your speakers, nothing will. If this band doesn’t achieve a prominent place among today’s rockers there is something drastically wrong with the cosmic equation!

Reviewer Greg “Bluesdog” Szalony hails from the New Jersey Delta.

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