Surprisingly, Dan Patlansky is now on his seventh album but this feels like the one to break him as a major act across the world rather than just his native South Africa.
The opening track on the album ‘Backbite’ is a monster of a piece, funky as hell and with a driving riff and stomping drum that grabs the ear and sets you spinning around the room. The louder you play it the better and is definitely a neighbour-botherer of a track. Leading into ‘Pop Collar Jockey’ gives you a much darker, moody number, intense and with a dense atmosphere it is unrelenting but brilliant for all that.
He is a fine guitarist but doesn’t try and shred the listener into submission and on numbers like ‘Fetch Your Spade’ he mixes up the powerful and driving stuff with the highly melodic and much softer.
This is clearly a man who has been around for a while – you don’t get these skills overnight – but he still sounds as committed and as fresh as he did years ago. Little surprise that he opened for Bruce Springsteen in Johannesburg (at Springsteen’s personal request) and had this album voted ‘Album of the year’ in Blues Rock Review’s top 20 of 2014, the only surprise is that he is relatively unknown over here.
Every track on the album presents another facet of his skills and aside from the blockbuster ‘Backbite’ I was moved by the monstrous emotion of ‘Your War’ and the album closer ‘Madison Lane’ where he gets to show his sensitive side on a beautiful but utterly sad ballad.
A strong talent and I’m really looking forward to seeing him at the Borderline on the 27th.
