Label: Provogue Records/Mascot Label Group
Release date: August 28, 2020
Producer: Eric Corne
Album length: 57.44 min
Genre: Blues Rock
Rating: 9.0/10
Walter Trout is a blues rock legend and one of the most prominent musicians in modern blues. The man who barely survived a liver transplant a few years back is a phenomenon in his own right. On top of that, over a career that spans fifty years, he’s lived through plenty of ups and downs. All the way from Canned Heat and John Lee Hooker to John Mayall, and then a hugely prolific solo career that has so far delivered a dozen albums, getting close to 30. His fans don’t hesitate when Walter Trout drops a new record. They just buy it, because whatever Walter puts down on tape is always guaranteed to have that absolute magnetism that a musician in the blues genre, with his particular brand of musical talent, can conjure up. And there’s only one Walter Trout. One and only. Nobody comes close.
The years have taken their toll, and Trout is finally “mellowing out.” He’s given up his debauched ways, even though he still plays as if the fire of courage and the drive of teenage passion were still burning in his fingers and soul. On his 27th album, too, he approaches everything he does like a young guy itching to prove himself. Fiery. His authentic, strictly chiseled style of guitar playing has always been a guarantee of songwriting and performance excellence. Not just that, but of “elusiveness.” More precisely, of a distinctive blues rock character. The solos are still an absolute one-of-a-kind thing, and surely the biggest magnet. So the guitar playing on the new album once again keeps the listener fully busy. The vocals remain utterly real in their emotion and passion. With them, the preaching and the blues grumbling are once more cranked up as far as they’ll go, and they speak to you with a greedy charm that’s hard to resist.
Immodestly put, “Ordinary Madness” is one of the strongest studio records Trout has offered in his long career. Yes. That’s a bold claim, given that the guy has a huge number of recording hours behind him. With this new album, which is confessional and even more personally intimate than its predecessor “Survivor Blues” (2019), Trout, in the role of observer, captures the spirit of our times as realistically as it gets, the times that most clear-thinking people, him included, have every right to gripe about as they silently watch the planet, and humanity along with it, sink.
The album opens with the spectral blues drama of the title track, which shakes you up right away and sums up everything the previous sentence describes. It’s all here. Reliving, accusing vocals and exceptional playing. All the ornaments, all the minimalist details, filigree sensual softness, exceptional control of tone. Every note speaks in its own way, and the guitar groans like a living creature responding to every last stimulus with intense feeling. So Trout is in all his glory right from the opening of the new album. Then the record gallops off in a rock direction with Wanna Dance, where a chunky Hammond and the contrasting pulse of the rhythm section join the signature phrase. There’s more musicality, yet the drama and the sense of melancholy don’t let up … The album is rich in ideas and wonderfully varied. And not everything is strictly blues (and rock)! Americana and country elements sneak into Heartland. My Foolish Pride and Heaven In Your Eyes are especially mellifluous, and the added motifs grab your attention too, so they could easily become regulars on radio stations that respect themselves, that is, ones with a good music program. The most wound-up track on the album is the closer OK Boomer, where, amid all the thundering instruments, Trout’s vocal fury pours oil on the fire.
It’s hard to pick out the highlights! Trout is of course strongest, time and again, wherever his guitar groans the most intensely. The title track, All Out Of Tears (written with Teeny Tucker, it’s about her late son), a stunning blues suite, or the rock-charged Make It Right with its solo “knitting and weaving” that you never want to end. In short, every song is truly polished to filigree perfection. It’s fascinating what you can squeeze out of just 12 bars. Blues is so much, much more. And Walter Trout reigns supreme at implanting musical figures that his original blues formula communicates with so brilliantly.
The Final Curtain is the track that’s bursting with anxiety, driven by a slower boogie rhythm. Trout’s harmonica firmly joins the guitar phrase. It’s a song about the inevitable final reckoning, when the judgment hour strikes and instead of the debt collector, an old woman with a scythe shows up at your door. The markedly dark The Sun Is Going Down captures even more of that queasy feeling about the approaching judgment hour. In its last third the song picks up speed in a rock direction, and its crescendo is, of course, yet another mighty Trout guitar solo.
The interplay between the four musicians is hellish. There’s chemistry, and you can feel it, superior and unmistakable. Walter Trout is no absolutist, so the keyboards especially, and the bass lines too, very skillfully use bits of the songs, the transitional parts above all, to spice them up vividly with extra tricks. The album is brewed from a lot of details that you keep discovering for a long time, and that’s exactly one of the most attractive things, the thing that calls you back again and again to this truly brilliant Trout achievement. The subtlety that the building blocks of the sonic picture develop is intensified to the max, and it comes through especially in the slower moments of the album, like the opening section of the deeply personal Up Above My Sky. It’s a kind of epitaph, tombstone, requiem, and one of the most intense songs on the album when it comes to the glow of emotion and passion.
The album “Ordinary Madness” was recorded in California, specifically in a studio owned by The Doors guitarist Robby Krieger. It’s that Californian paradise on Earth, where you find yourself surrounded by an endless array of vintage guitars and all the other old-school gear that guarantees this record’s absolute analog sound. You know how it is. All that cosmic The Doors junk is standing right there, and you can borrow it and cut a track with it. It doesn’t get more honest than that. The album was recorded before the corona pandemic was declared.
Walter Trout remains an incredible musical artist. He’s steeply approaching seventy, puts out a new album every year, and creative inspiration never leaves him in the lurch. That’s why “Ordinary Madness” is yet another piece in the colorful mosaic of this brilliant musician’s career, simply put (once again, for Trout) universally unique, and an achievement you listen to again and again with great pleasure. Maturity, the bitter realization of mortality, and yet still enough constant childlike playfulness to prove that Walter Trout and his music stay forever evergreen.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Ordinary Madness
2. Wanna Dance
3. My Foolish Pride
4. Heartland
5. All Out Of Tears
6. Final Curtain Call
7. Heaven In Your Eyes
8. The Sun Is Going Down
9. Make It Right
10. Up Above My Sky
11. OK Boomer
Lineup:
Walter Trout – guitar, vocals, harmonica
Teddy ‘Zig Zag’ Andreadis – keyboards, Wurlitzer, Hammond organ
Johnny Griparic – bass guitar
Michael Leasure – drums
Guest musicians:
Skip Edwards
Drake ‘Munkihaid’ Shining
Anthony Grisham
