Label: J&R Adventures
Release date: June 14, 2024
Production: Black Country Communion
Album length: 50.37 min
Genre: Hard Rock
Rating: 8.5/10
Black Country Communion (BCC for short) are a quartet! A supergroup quartet that needs no long introduction. And to top it all off, there’s a father-son generational angle, more or less. The lineup: vocalist and bassist Glenn Hughes, almost 73; guitarist Joe Bonamassa, 47; drummer Jason Bonham, 58; and keyboardist Derek Sherinian, almost 58.
As the title hints, “V” is album number five. Writing, recording and releasing BCC albums always has to fit around everybody’s schedules, and because of that Black Country Communion even came close to falling apart. It was precisely over priorities that things blew up between Hughes and Bonamassa years ago. Bonamassa brought the legendary vocalist, whom the public had long since and rightly crowned the ‘voice of rock’, back down to earth by explaining that his solo career always comes first, and he knows it, with everything else after. Fair enough. Bonamassa can sell out arenas around the world these days as if it were nothing. So in a way, those of us who follow BCC can be glad the foursome found the time for a follow-up to the excellent “BCC IV”, which came out a solid seven years ago.
The new album is everything you want from Black Country Communion. Bonamassa grew up on the sound of Led Zeppelin (the opener Enlighten drives that home instantly) and the thunder of drums, and his phrasing has absorbed not just Led Zeppelin’s DNA (Jason’s drumming, fills and all, is a perfect imprint of his late father’s style, and Jason even has John Bonham’s face on the heads of his bass drums), but also an absolute, eternal fascination with the evergreen pioneering work of those seventies rock and roll icons. The fat tone of Joe’s Gibson Les Paul gets vividly cranked up in the delivery of all that destructive noise. It builds a downright spicy thunderousness. It’s out to chase the abrasive elemental force with which Jimmy Page shocked the world long ago. The new BCC album simply can’t cut those ties with Led Zeppelin either. So? Nothing new. Nothing groundbreaking for the evolution of music itself, but served up with a ravenous swagger dictated by all that raw, primal energetic sludge, which we of course understand as? Rock’n’roll. No less, no more. Just a bomb and a right hook straight to the forehead! And it works instantly, hypnotically. Simple. It seduces. It doesn’t get simpler than this. But the road to that simplicity is often a lot harder than we think.
This time the feeling of a direct link to the Led Zeppelin inspiration is even more intense, because (and this is the surprise of the album) Derek Sherinian is often barely noticeable on keyboards. Sure, he steps up on one of the album’s peaks, the pompous Love And Faith, with a Hammond intro in the style of July Morning (Uriah Heep), but then the rest of the song drags us right back into Joe Bonamassa’s eternal fascination with the Zep classic Kashmir.
Thank God Glenn Hughes is here! Yes. That Glenn Hughes, who always has a decisive influence on the expressive, artistic reach of any act he joins and, intentionally or not, shuffles all their artistic cards. Whether in his solo career, or by shaping turning points in other artists’ musical directions over the years, which even the mighty Deep Purple didn’t escape. Glenn Hughes is the essential element who, with his boundless vocal majesty of a ‘black musician trapped in a white man’s body’, sets the rules of the game at the level of one-of-a-kind expression. That’s how it is with BCC and that’s how it stays on “V”. Without Glenn Hughes, BCC would be, to put it mildly, just a bunch of decent Led Zeppelin imitators. But with Glenn on the team, “V” is an album that honestly and without any beating around the bush blasts you straight into the stratosphere of the most primal emotions and passions, the ones BCC toy with so skillfully, reaching even the most hidden corners of their fans’ souls. The dark, ruinous charm of this record’s demonic allure is driven above all by Glenn’s eternal confessional flirting with every evil spirit, temptation and persecution, as well as his by now proverbial ‘complaining’, with which, through a stunning army of signature soul acrobatics, he pulls you straight into his world!
The closer The Open Road, liberally belted with the dictates of a cowbell, owes a few moments to the inspiration of good old Free, with the band catching their breath in an extended jam right before the final return to the main phrase that wraps up the album. Stay Free carries a funk contour, for which Sherinian shares responsibility with the stately, supple rhythm of Glenn’s bass guitar, evoking with a well-chosen sound Hughes’s time in Deep Purple (especially the era of the album “Stormbringer”). Red Sun, which a pile of mood swings carry all the way to the chorus (over the course of the song), counts as one of the peaks of incredible melancholy gathered in one place. Brilliant.
“V” has a wonderful character all the way through. It’s on par with its predecessor “BCC IV”. It delivers an exceptionally compact approach to songwriting and an exceptional energetic payoff from the essence of what stands behind the word rock’n’roll. The album was recorded in one go, and still boasts more-than-enviable variety of ideas. The guys laid this album down on studio tape in a very short span of time. The band came into the studio and simply played the songs, ‘in one take’, as the Brits say. No kitsch, no frills. Pure primal instinct. Given the immeasurable talents of all four musicians in this quartet, the band’s fans will of course see that as the expected standard. But it’s a standard raised to a level of musical uniqueness by an exceptional chemistry that only these four men can develop together. It’s good that the gaps between BCC releases are long. In that time the burning desire grows to bring out the best in you, to a degree the musicians themselves often can’t explain. That’s why there’s the music that comes out of them, which leads and guides us to those answers.
Glenn recently said that in the coming years he might devote himself only to his solo career and fully distance himself from working in other musical formations such as BCC, among others. By the next BCC album, if it ever happens, he’ll be close to 80. Considering that at almost 73 he still sings like a warbling nightingale who has just recorded the first Trapeze demo, the thought that things might be any different seven years from now is downright blasphemous.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Enlighten
2. Stay Free
3. Red Sun
4. Restless
5. Letting Go
6. Skyway
7. You’re Not Alone
8. Love And Faith
9. Too Far Gone
10. The Open Road
Lineup:
Glenn Hughes – vocals, bass guitar
Joe Bonamassa – guitar
Derek Sherinian – keyboards
Jason Bonham – drums
