The Cold Stares have now expanded to a three piece outfit and this first album in that format is belting stuff.
All the tracks on ‘Voices’ have a very individual sound – ranging from stoner rock to heavy Blues to Zeppelin-esque imagery – and equally a sound that is theirs alone. Self-produced by the band and recorded almost entirely over the course of just two days with engineer Mark Needham (Taj Mahal, The Killers, Imagine Dragons, Walk the Moon, Fleetwood Mac), I would say that it is their most powerful and integrated album to date.
Lead guitarist and vocalist Chris Tapp wrote the songs and there are at least a couple that I will be listening to for a while to come. “A lot of these tunes deal with really personal things that have been on my mind for a while,” says Tapp. “I just had to live enough life and get enough experience under my belt to know how to talk about them, to know how to feel comfortable opening up those veins and sharing whatever came out.”
It opens with the heavy Blues of ‘Nothing But The Blues’ and you can feel the way that the band has really pulled together.
Then there is the Americana intensity of ‘Throw That Stone’ with guest vocals by bluegrass singer Brenna Macmillan and mandolin by the acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Warren Hood
At times they have a sound that is almost mid-sixties English pop but that underlying power and authority still bursts through.
An excellent album, definitely one for some heavy radio play this Spring.
