Critic's evaluation
Five years after a reunion. 15 years after the last release. 30 years after the debut album was announced. This is the chronology that comprises Happiness Bastards, the first album by The Black Crowes since Before The Frost... Until The Freeze was released back in 2009.
Nico Bereciartua's resonating guitar already dominates the scene, instilling a rural, western aroma, while building a folk atmosphere with generous doses of blues. With Erik Deutsch's piano playing a big part in the song, with its high, syncopated notes, the song soon exudes an attractive, irresistible sensuality. Under a 4x4 time signature, Cully Symington's drums build up a simple but sufficiently attractive beat. With the sweet and sour sound of the hammond filling out the melodic base, Bedside Manners reintroduces the typical insertion of soulful female choirs that so marked the songs of The Black Crowes, while Chris Robinson matures the essence of the duo with his traditional and iconic timbre. Energetic and exciting, Bedside Manners is a song that deals with living with people who add nothing to us, the discovery of love for interest and the desire for the sense of lightness provided by distancing oneself from this type of individual.
Sexy, dangerous. Exciting. With its dirty distortion, the guitar riff appears attractive and, curiously, manipulatively seductive in order to introduce generous doses of hard rock into the new dawn. Flowing quickly into a structure that sounds like blues rock, reminiscent of the sound of names like ZZ Top and AC/DC, Rats And Clowns manages, even with this striking ardour, to put the listener on the path to Louisiana by mixing hard rock, folk and soul in a suitably equalized measure. The most interesting thing is that, even though it's drenched in a rhythm that appeals to the masses, it deals not only with pure heroin addiction, but also with how an addict sees it and the consequences of this habit.
At first comfortingly fresh and bucolically swinging, it's as if the melody gives the listener a breath of the scent of the grass still damp from the serenity, the wetness of the cold water of a stream in the middle of the immensity of the meadow and the still timid warmth of the sun seeking its place in the twilight sky. The softness of the instrumental created between lap steel guitar and a vocal full of delicate melismas comes to a sudden end when the melody takes on a distorted, acidic character that hypnotizes the listener with a kind of Nickelback-style distorted-electric folk. Provocative and exciting, Cross Your Fingers is divided between a howling guitar and another, by Rich Robinson, that is more stern and rationally syncopated. With a hammond delivering the sweet acidity of soul during the transitional bridge between the first and second parts of the song, Cross Your Fingers is a product that delivers sensuality, desire and generous doses of libido in its romantic-manipulative plot. A storyline that shows an individual deceived by love, transformed by passion and corrupted of his kind essence by a lobotomic someone. A plot that shows a pure person becoming the representative of a one-sided truth governed by impulse.
It has a cloudy feel to it. Intoxicating and certainly somewhat melancholy, the song presents a sunny but lonely landscape in its infinitude. Fortunately, with the entrance of the keyboard under the sonar of the hammond organ, it now has a sweetly acidic flavor that invites you to continue in this landscape. It's then that C. Robinson's open, high-pitched timbre with its deep essence enters the scene to enhance the soundscape. Although showing the effects of age, the singer manages to deliver what both the listener and regular fans of The Black Crowes expect: a vocal with soul and R&B influences. Even under a melodic linearity, Wanting And Waiting exalts and exudes the essence of folk fused with hard rock and southern rock in a way that, together, communicates aesthetic familiarities with names like Aerosmith. Adorned by a chorus of harmonic breadth thanks to the soulful female backing vocals, a detail that makes it take on a character typical of the group's compositions, Wanting And Waiting is a soft, swinging track that talks about loneliness, but a loneliness that alludes to the duo's big break. From this point, it's possible to see a lyrical familiarity between this song and The Rope, Semisonic's single, even though the melodies definitely don't completely match. Packed with content that can also be interpreted as romantic, addressing the desire for reconciliation and even the need for one last goodbye, Wanting And Waiting simply brings an individual ready to burst into flames at the first chance of a meeting.
The guitar appears between strums that are comfortably bucolic and velvety cheerful, like the warmth of the sun breaking through the treetops and warming the body of a person asleep among the trunks. In the form of an irresistible folk song with a leaning towards jazz, the gentle tinkling of the dome of the cymbal sets the rhythmic tempo. Cooperating with this is Lainey Wilson, who lends her high-pitched vocals during the chorus and instills Wilted Rose with extra doses of bucolic content. It's in this way that the song talks about the cessation of war. About the acquisition of a peace treaty. Even so, there is disappointment and hopelessness on the face of an individual directly affected by the armed conflict who is now dominated by cynicism and a sense of revenge.
Its beginning already has a rough and provocative sensuality. Just like Rats And Clowns, the present and still enigmatic atmosphere manages to immerse itself in a folky hard rock essence along the same lines as Aerosmith. Without much effort, the song is consistent in its contagion and mature in its melody. Guided by the sharp acidity of the hammond in the sound base, the track parades a soft sound from a fluid drum beat. Although it doesn't experiment with funk, as it evolves, Dirty Cold Sun, a work about the mixture of resentment, the will to overcome natural problems and revenge for rejection and the consequent suffering from the end of a relationship, communicates an aesthetic similarity to Walk This Way, a single by the Boston bad boys. With a more raw rhythmic-melodic structure compared to previous songs, this track grows in harmony with a chorus that encourages soul mixing. Catchy without being catchy, but presenting the sound that fans of The Black Crowes expect to hear, Dirty Cold Sun, together with Rats And Clowns, forms a duo of b-side singles from Happiness Bastards.
Along with the resonating guitar, the harmonica emerges between rolls and swinging cries, setting the listener up in the American backlands. Structured on the basis of the blues, the melody consequently features a piano with notes that also hint at sensuality. Bleed It Dry is a simple but infectious track that talks about the liberation of a community governed by a behavior based on sameness that consumes all the individual's energy.
Loud and empowered, it's the drums that open the new scenario with a precise, slightly dirty and intense beat. Curiously, what follows is a soft, cozy and sweet melody. Exuding nostalgia and a freshness such as that felt through a spring sunset, this track features Chris Robinson adopting a lyrical interpretation that sounds similar to the way Steven Tyler makes his voice resonate in Aerosmith songs. Melodically providing a slight similarity to the sound created by Green Day in their respective single Castaway, Flesh Wound is attractive and catchy, but without being appealing. Maturing as a song about the end of a relationship with an emphasis on mature thoughts about the facts and the need to get over them, Flesh Wound brings such a lovely melody to this storyline that it is clearly the first ballad on Happiness Bastards.
Right from its first sounds, the instrumental already showed itself capable of building groove, cadence and contagion in a very equalized way. Mixing hard rock, folk and traces of a rapped sound in a way reminiscent, as in Dirty Cold Sun, of the structure of Walk This Way, an Aerosmith single, the song also uses lap steel to provide, as well as lightness, a comfortable feeling of intoxication. Accentuating the essence of southern rock already experienced in the overwhelming part of the album, Follow The Moon comes with a fiery swing and an infectious softness, while its lyricism provides an ode to rock. The excesses, the intensity, the bohemia. The hot blood, the change of shifts, the excess of libido. Night turns into day and everything happens when all of bureaucratically normal society is asleep. And it is precisely this viscerality, this vivacity, this electricity for life that Follow The Moon is about, a confidence in the depth of living that is even damaging for those who live it. It's no wonder that the song's most striking line is "rock and roll has made a mess of you".
It's soft and rejuvenating. Caring and comfortable. Compassionate and caring. Hopeful and reenergizing. Like the first rays of the sun carefully illuminating a field of flowers still damp from the heat, the introductory melody is like a delicate holding of hands as you walk through an environment still full of enigma. With a serene percussive beat and a soft guitar, the protagonist sonar is the high-pitched shrill of the harmonica, which shrieks delicately while adding generous doses of a nostalgically floral scent to the atmosphere. With slight moments of familiarity between its sweet and introspective harmony and the one offered in É Preciso Saber Viver, a single by Titãs, Kindred Friend joins Flesh Wound in the Happiness Bastards ballad team, reaching its podium without difficulty. With its warm and subtly bucolic touches, the track is like a message, a letter, a request for a truce, a sincere and honest request for forgiveness between one Robinson and another. Autobiographical in nature, Kindred Friend sounds like a reconciliation between the two brothers, based on their maturity and resilience in leaving disagreements in the past and looking to tomorrow for the new possibilities of a second chance. With such an interpretation evident from the verses "oh, kindred friend, (kindred friend) where have you been?" and "guess it's been a while", the final wish, the happiness of the reunion and the ecstasy of reconciliation is in the sentimental and touching final verse "always make me smile".
After a 13-year hiatus when it came to producing their own material, The Black Crowes seem to have made up. After years of not speaking to each other, the Robinson brothers have offered not only a breath of fresh air to their fans, but a current product that honors southern rock. Happiness Bastards is where bucolic meets rock and exudes that swinging sweat typical of the transition from the 70s to the 80s.
Bringing the American country sound back to rock music, the duo have managed, with their new material, to blend songs of a romantic-radiophonic nature in a way that meets the expectations of the sound that their followers have longed to hear and of an autobiographical nature.
Of course, between these two subdivisions there are the new classics from the Atlanta duo. Experimenting with more daring, excitement and even libidinous content in their lyrical-melodic interpretations, The Black Crowes ended up composing good new songs for their already vast curriculum.
Although Wanting And Waiting was sold as the first single, it's not necessarily the song that definitively marks Happiness Bastards. For the sake of following a pre-established pattern, but with the authenticity to make the melody exude sensuality and desire, Dirty Cold Sun, Rats And Clowns and, to a lesser extent, Follow The Moon.
Produced by Jay Joice, Happiness Bastards is an album that continues to honor The Black Crowes as one of the greats of the southern rock scene, along with, among others, ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Creedence Clearwater Revival. However, far beyond this subgenre, Joice has managed to fuse the folk-hard rock essence of the duo to build sensuality amidst the fusion of other genres that have marked the duo's sound, such as soul and blues.
It is through this mixture of rock rhythms that the lyrical layers are embraced to the point of delivering the ideal emotions for themes such as relationships. On the album, sentimentality is also a defining ingredient in works such as Rats And Clowns, which seems to portray heroin addiction, Follow The Moon, an ode to rock, and Kindred Friend, as an autobiographical work that deals with the reconciliation of the Robinson brothers.
Even so, there is a negative point in the mix that makes it difficult to fully appreciate all the instruments. Emphasizing the guitars, different keyboard instruments and even the drums, the task left something to be desired by not making Sven Pipien's contribution on bass easily audible, something that was picked up in a few moments before the harmonica solo in Kindred Friend.
Released on 03/15/2024 via Silver Arrow Records, Happiness Bastards is an album that, more than honoring southern rock, shows the resilience and maturity of the Robinson brothers in overcoming disagreements and resuming their mutual love for music and rock. It's material in which the listener can easily get lost between the striking swing and the intoxicating sertanejo aroma exhaled at every melodic corner. Welcome back, The Black Crowes.
