Known primarily for his ivory-tinkling skills and feral howling with his day job, the Black Diamond Heavies, JAMES LEG has decided to push the duo format into new areas altogether and do away with the guitars (almost) entirely on this solo outing ‘Solitary Pleasure.’
Recorded during an immense winter cold snap at a converted analogue studio built inside the oldest standing church in Rutherford County, Tennessee, ‘Solitary Pleasure’ finds Mr. Leg joining forces with drummer Andrew ‘Jet’ Jody (Pearlene, Barrence Whitfield & the Savages) and making a foundation-shakin’ Rock’n’Roll racket with nary a guitar within earshot.
The only six-string action on the album comes courtesy of guest Dillon Watson’s mutant Paul Kossoff-style turn on ‘Do How You Wanna’. Outside of that the songs are built up around Leg’s dextrous electric piano, hymnal organ and keyboard bass, all ushered along by Jody’s thunderous grooves. Other guest turns include brass and backing vocals, but primarily it’s the keyboards driving nails though our hearts here.
Stylistically, the first half is eclectic going on confused. The Lo-Fi, fell-on-hard-times blues ‘Nobody’s Fault’ swings like a broken saloon door in an ancient ghost town and scores first time, while Leg’s stunted blues holler rises from the depths of the Mississippi delta on ‘Do How You Wanna.’ Less successful are the laboured Gospel-infused strains of ‘Georgia’ and the truly odd ‘No License (song for the caged bird)’. The N’Awlins-style funeral brass on the latter appears to be playing an entirely different song to Jody and the Rev Leg and the two factions never even threaten to meet.
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So far, so frustrating, but then things improve in real style. Ironically, it’s a hell for leather cover of ace guitar man Link Wray’s Biblical epic ‘Fire & Brimstone’ which turns the tide and from then on we’re really in business. Both ‘Whatever It Takes’ and the blues-testifyin’ ‘Drowning in Fire’ pivot around louche, Doors-y grooves and find the Rev Leg excelling at his Fender Rhodes piano, while the weirdly redemptive Steve Gibson cover ‘Drinking too Much’ (“everything I touch turns to shit...you’re the exception”) could almost be a roughed-up cousin to Free’s ‘My Brother Jake’. Perhaps the very best of all is the concluding ‘No Time to Tarry’: a stompin’, mud-garglin’ celebration fulla tambourines and joyful upright piano.
The Rev James Leg and his skin-bashin’ henchman, then, are two holy rollin’ men in black treatin’ us to some unholy sonic hoodoo voodoo. With a couple of exceptions, they brew up a mean still’s worth of firewater-breathin’ garage-blues thrills that oughta be drunk all over the globe.
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