Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Stray Train
Label: SAOL
Release: 2017
Duration: 49:35
Rating: 4.5/5
Even though Stray Train are barely two years old, this is a quintet of hand-picked stallions, oiled with every trick in the book and shod with flinty musical experience and serious mileage. The chemistry between the guys clicked right away and works at a truly enviable level, so it’s no wonder that, in such a pleasant working atmosphere, the band quickly hatched a studio debut with one of the longest titles of the rock era »Just ‘Cause You Got the Monkey Off Your Back Doesn´t Mean The Circus Has Left Town …«, which counts as more than an excellent opening act in the life of the new group. And because the guys know you have to strike while the iron is hot, just over a year after the debut comes its studio successor, meaningfully titled »Blues From Hell – The Legend of the Courageous Five«. So if Frank Zappa played jazz from hell, the legend of the courageous five is above all about blues from hell, the way Howlin’ Wolf once howled it.
After the debut came out, Stray Train hit the road for a long European tour with Kadavar and Blues Pills and played, no joke, a whole 43 shows in one go, with over 30,000 fans catching their gigs, stripped down to the bare essentials of penetratingly rattling rock aesthetics of hard rock, drenched in a generous dose of bluesy eroticism.
On the new album, Stray Train present themselves as an even more mature and more focused rock entity. »Blues From Hell – The Legend of the Courageous Five« comes across in this respect as even more polished and full of ideas, with an even bigger dose of fired-off rounds of primal rock’n’roll engraving. Last but not least, it’s also an album whose production grabs even more effectively and convincingly than the debut. The band really wanted to squeeze the maximum out of its creative juices. So the new album was recorded at the Wisseloord studio in the Netherlands, where giants like Queen, U2 and Depeche Mode, among many others, once laid down tracks, with Ronald Prent, who has worked with Rammstein, Depeche Mode, Queensryche,… in the past, taking care of the final shaping of the album’s sound.
If we weren’t talking about the highly honed quality of the individuals who make up Stray Train, this whole thing would never have gotten off the ground. Picture the inherited directness and bristling audacity of Led Zeppelin, add the gloom and obscure aesthetics of The Cult, and of course, neatly packaged alongside, the dandyish rascal outline of the likes of Guns N’ Roses, if not Vain and early Poison. And of course, the structure of the songs, as well as the grooving, warm and organic sound, will feel very, very familiar to anyone who puts their chips on the legacy of seventies rock, while hanging out with the sonically kindred Blues Pills on the recent joint European tour was very welcome anyway. After the opening, spiked-with-vibrance hard rock catalyst Electrified, comes an extremely strong composition, we can say one of the strongest on the album, which brings practically all the elements of the band’s musical vision together under one roof . That’s the excellent Heading for the Sun. No wonder the band picked it as the lead single and shot a video for it. The band has funk kinetics down cold (Days Gone), and the mystical Emona unfolds with a particularly mysterious and almost fatally alluring vibe. The album keeps up that high-quality constant from here on out, too!
Luka Lamut’s vocals are actually ideal for blending bluesy charm with hair/glam rock/metal rascality, and they’re one of the main carriers of the album’s musicality and the rapacious catchiness of the chorus melodies, as well as the bite of the verses themselves. It’s full of passion, emotion, instinct, softness, punch and then some. All of that adorns Luka Lamut’s vocal output. Guitarist Jure Golobič proves once again what an ace and master he is, shaking out of his sleeve incredibly inventive, concise and polished solos in the mid-eight passages, which are in themselves among the most attractive gems of every single song. The rhythm section’s outstanding kinetics and sparkle give the album particular potency and groove throughout. In short, the sonic contrasts delivered by the building blocks of the sound are optimized down to the detail. The album grabs you right away and doesn’t let up. The English of the verses is more than excellent metrically, and Stray Train don’t give the impression at all that they’re actually a Slovenian band. In that respect they raise the quality bar, compared to the rest of the Slovenian rock bands, to a new, higher level.
On that count, »Blues From Hell« is a triumphant continuation of the story from the debut, and so it opens the doors to recognition on the international music scene for the band even more confidently and uncompromisingly. This is an album that’s truly outfitted with quality from head to toe, with every detail showing great dedication to polishing and composing. On that count it has the finished character and potential to launch the band into the league of the hot new-wave guard of hard rock and blues revivalists and to widen the band’s fan base internationally. This album, which we can file under the hard rock genre, is certainly one of the best albums to come out on the domestic scene this year, and one that will have fans of this music abroad pricking up their ears wide!
Line-up
Luka Lamut – vocals
Jure Golobič – guitar
Boban Milunović – guitar
Niko Jug – bass guitar
Viktor Ivanović – drums
Production
The Corageous Five
Track list
1. Electrified
2. Heading For The Sun
3. Days Gone
4. Emona
5. Mad Machine
6. Blues From Hell
7. House Of Cards
8. Love Is Just A Breath Away
9. My Baby´s Ride
10. Give It Away
11. No Easy
12. Miracle
