ALABAMA SHAKES at SXSW Music Festival. March 16, 2012. Rating: NNNN
The Alabama Shakes play an unbelievably authentic vintage of rock’n’roll.
The type of stuff that matches up perfectly with Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Ike and Tina and most other stripes of classic 60s soul and RnB.
They make Adele sound futuristic.
And that’s just their sound. Their lives are similarly out of another era: Brittany Howard, the 22-year-old singer and guitarist, lives with her father at the end of a dirt road in Athens, Alabama. She used to deliver mail. Her bandmates live similarly time-warped existences.
Last year, they couldn’t book a show in their hometown. This year, they’re the toast of SXSW, and there couldn’t be more anticipation around their debut record coming out in early April.
At their show at Easy Tiger, the band’s last of the festival, the hype reached fever pitch. People were packed into the club like sardines there was not enough room to move your arms. They were either at your side or stuck in the air.
The music was note-perfect soul. Howard has a powerful voice, and knows exactly where to come in strong and when to back off. And when she wasn’t pouring it out into the microphone, she was working wonders with her Gibson SG.
Listen to their breakout song Hold On here:
The Shakes started out as a cover band, and that still shows up in their sets. Most of the music sounds like it was spawned out of covers, soul gems that they morphed into originals. Combine good taste (Howard claims Memphis Minnie as a hero) with good musicianship, and there’s enough there to get started.
But when you can’t tell the covers and originals apart, it’s because the band has a little ways to go in making their songs sound more original.
SXSW always seems to be on a retro kick, but this is over-the-top retro. The Alabama Shakes are a note-for-note facsimile of a bygone era in rock music. It works because they sound so good doing it.
If anyone even needed proof that classic 1960s soul was timeless music, this is it.
