Full Moon Magazine (Czech Republic) reviews Capitol Hill Country Blues
Here is the translation from writer Jiří Vladimír Matýsek:
"Reviewer Patrick Wells once said, that Gravelroad sounds like John Lee Hooker if he was a member of Black Sabbath. At that time, he didn't know that the record which fits this statement that is yet to come. The album is entitled Capitol Hill Country Blues and Gravelroad continues to sharpen their specific psychedelic-hard-blues music with both main genres melting in a very organic way. The four-piece band harvests the products of their previous records, sharpens and deepens the concepts they started earlier and brings with it the sound of high originality.
The sound is dark, hypnotic in its repetitiveness (in doom-blues piece Song To Darkness gets well known Mississippi mud an adequate musical form). In equal shares they take from both musicians mentioned before, which are easily connected in one single expression. This expression is - sometimes less, sometimes more - spiced with slight psychedelic odor, which takes listener to the long trips through space and time.
The key elements are two guitars, sometimes interweaving, sometimes fighting. More, the guitar figures are quite simple, based on the traditional blues, even that there is no classical 12-bar on the record. Gravelroad doesn't need that. The apex stone is the rhythm section, bass and hard-hitting drums.
You can feel quite a lot of devotion to the blues from the record. It is not taken in the narrow-minded way, it is taken as a base, as river, which flows under the surface and only sometimes it bursts over the surface. Capitol Hill Country Blues is a record for the new millennium. It is modern, with interesting sound, amusing. The Record of the year? Unlikely, this title will go to some well known name. But for me, it is."
The sound is dark, hypnotic in its repetitiveness (in doom-blues piece Song To Darkness gets well known Mississippi mud an adequate musical form). In equal shares they take from both musicians mentioned before, which are easily connected in one single expression. This expression is - sometimes less, sometimes more - spiced with slight psychedelic odor, which takes listener to the long trips through space and time.
The key elements are two guitars, sometimes interweaving, sometimes fighting. More, the guitar figures are quite simple, based on the traditional blues, even that there is no classical 12-bar on the record. Gravelroad doesn't need that. The apex stone is the rhythm section, bass and hard-hitting drums.
You can feel quite a lot of devotion to the blues from the record. It is not taken in the narrow-minded way, it is taken as a base, as river, which flows under the surface and only sometimes it bursts over the surface. Capitol Hill Country Blues is a record for the new millennium. It is modern, with interesting sound, amusing. The Record of the year? Unlikely, this title will go to some well known name. But for me, it is."
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