75. Rival Sons
The Forum
10 December 2014
Rival Sons didn’t so much enter the blues rock scene as they did kick the door off its hinges, swan in wearing snakeskin boots, and slam down Great Western Valkyrie like it was a royal decree from the Houses of the Holy. They landed in the zeitgeist with all the subtlety of a meteor strike, instantly hailed as the spiritual heirs to an era when riffs were sacred, and frontmen looked like they’d wandered out of a vision quest and into a bar fight.
Scott Holliday, custom boots courtesy of Jeffery West, riffs courtesy of the guitar gods of Valhalla, looks like a man genetically engineered to solo through bar brawls and charm snake oil out of rattlers. Honestly, even his name sounds like someone you’d meet in a dust-blown saloon, two towns past trouble.
Then there’s Jay Buchanan, a frontman who seems to have been summoned by ritual sacrifice and patchouli oil. A strange brew of Crispin Glover’s unsettling twitchiness, Jim Morrison’s poetic death-stare, and mid-seventies Robert Plant’s shirtless thunder-god. He doesn’t sing; he channels. Deadly earnest, deeply hypnotic. One minute he’s howling at the moon, the next recoiling from Holliday’s latest riff like he’s just been struck by lightning.
Even Michael Miley, looking like he took a wrong turn out of Deliverance, telegraphs bass lines that slither between Holliday’s guitar licks like the death rattle of an angry snake. It’s tight, it’s feral, it’s utterly spellbinding.
And not a single shred of banter. This is not a band that wastes time with chit-chat. They arrive, they unleash, they level the joint, and they vanish with an explosion that threatens to bend space-time.
Then, as if summoned by the convergence of bourbon, blues-rock and Camden, my friend, the Corabi support act guitarist, appears. Our blues-rock spirit guide. Half man, half leather-clad legend. Born of dive bars, forged in the sonic smog of Aces & Eights, met serenading John Corabi with a bottle of Wild Turkey whilst nonchalantly brushing off the shattered remnants of a flute-based goth band that had just imploded on stage.
Frankly, if he hadn’t been at this gig, we’d have summoned the dark lord of blues rock to have a word. London would’ve collapsed in on itself. But he was there. Of course he was. Because this was Blues Rock Valhalla. And Rival Sons? They weren’t playing a gig; they were writing scripture.