Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Those Death Wish Blues will get you in the end, but until that time when the clocks reach their appointed hour you have the chance, the sublime opportunity to delve into two of the modern greats as they combine their incredible talent in an album that beats down the door of frustrating and riddled inelegance that has come to define an era dominated somewhat by the bland and crafted lyrical dullness.
Blues may have come close to its own death as the old century plodded on, becoming a target of those who saw its expression and insight as being detrimental to the generations who were coming through and had no affiliation to the past, to what they saw as a message of old men and women that had longed since made any sense.
Country was facing the same issues, and yet in glorious style of mergers and naturally melding duos, both Country and Blues have found their respective genres refuelled, reenergised, and struck by the issues and problems that face our world today and responded in kind with a blistering resurgence that in this instances culminates in Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton giving the handsome and wonderfully brutal finger to the naysayers in the form of their debut collaboration in studio album form of Death Wish Blues.
This is an album of swagger. This is an album of dramatic insurgence against the forces of the dull and the dutifully bored. The only result of the wish is that it gives the listener the belief that they are alive, filled with the force laid down in the groundwork of the Blues.
With Kendall Wind, Mickey Finn, and Aaron Johnstone adding exotic flavour to the pair’s generously sounding output, the album reaches into the soul and drains all the negativity that has come to be part of our existence in a swoop of guitar that is outrageously cool and which defends the honour of the genre with ease.
Across tracks such as Down In The Mud, Settle For Less, No Apology, Lover On The Side, Trauma, and the sublime opening rip the plaster of the scar appreciation of Deathwish, Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton fulfil a sense of destiny’s call. For in Death Wish Blues the revenge of a genre is a dedicated pulse of unrelenting pleasure, it is the vengeance against the lacklustre and the damned who easily decried the early demise, and those Death Wish Blues are life affirming and genuine.
One of the best albums of the year, a lethal combination in action.
Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton release Death Wish Blues on May 19th on Rounder Records.
Ian D. Hall