If you’re going to get flying drunk to music, don’t waste your time with anything less concentrated than the current brew from ALEX GOMEZ.
Alex does not make life easy. He allows no safety net, no discretion, no surrender His first two blister-raising albums set punishing standards. His severed voice, acid guitar and subterranean kick drum set him apart. Texas and Delta songs are punked over and the blues just roars..
Now he’s back with third album “Warm Sensations”. This time with no drum, less tune, and a madness to make you pull out teeth. Mostly your own.
“Warm Sensations” might qualify as the wrongest name for an album this century. “Scalding Pain” might be closer.
This is not a complaint, by the way. In my world, Alex Gomez is a big star. After his second album “Metallic Blue Electric” there was only one way for him to go: FURTHUR. More rasp in the guitar, more slash and burn on the voice, more head-busting rage in the lyrics. It’s blues to put on a bill with HELLA, LIGHTNING BOLT, JOSH T. PEARSON and JOHNNY DOWD. Maybe next time he’ll get a drummer, a bass player and a saxophone player, but this time it’s right down to the basement of the soul with all distractions sliced away.
The ten new songs go three minutes a piece. Health and Sanity Regulations would have disallowed any more. The flying bottleneck slide is more or less in free fall from the beginning. The gravitational drag of twelve bars can go bugger itself. Like the very most accomplished blues players of long ago, GOMEZ sustains a formless rush of incredibly expressive playing that sounds improvised, unpredictable and dangerous. “Midnight Rendezvous” and “Baby Momma” take the approach to something like a limit, but it never once sounds like falling apart. Crazy stuff.
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Sex and drugs seem to be the immediate obsession. Titles like “Her Name Is Pain”, “Jellyroll Cupcake”, “Girls Go Wild”, "Sookie Sookie Sheila” and “Boogie Shack” give a pretty good idea of the range. But anyone with a heavy heart and a rage for things to be better can charge themselves up with this stuff. It’s what crazy youngsters should be filling their bellies with.
Final track “Guitar Man” blazes out his own salvation - it torches Alvin Lee’s “Going Home” and there’s almost a smile of boogie joy as GOMEZ rips through its fiery 2 minutes 22.
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