Rapidly rising new young quintet Voodoo Vegas’ debut album, ‘The Rise Of Jimmy Silver’, set for release on March 4th on the band’s own label, distributed by Cargo, is nothing other than a glorious, guitar driven, melody drenched, hard rock delight. Since forming in 2006 in Bournemouth, the band have gigged tirelessly on both home turf and the continent, honing their craft during regular rounds of the French, Belgian, Italian and German live circuits, and raising the musical bar still higher in support slots to standard bearers such as Glenn Hughes, Uriah Heep, The Wildhearts and Fozzy.
Having won over hordes of fans with their tight, powerful live performances – let alone a storming set-list of self-penned crowd-pleasers – it then took Voodoo Vegas less than 24 hours to smash through the original target of their April 2012 PledgeMusic.com campaign to fund the recording of their debut album, before going on to raise a jaw-dropping 344% of the figure the band first aimed for. Aiming high, they subsequently managed to secure the services of acclaimed producer Pedro Ferreira, (The Darkness, Therapy?, Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros, Enter Shikari, Tokyo Dragons) and booked Wales’ renowned Rockfield Studios to record ‘The Rise Of Jimmy Silver’ in the summer of 2012.
‘The Rise Of Jimmy Silver’ is a lean, filler-free first offering at 34 minutes (short by the standards of today but I’d rather have 34 minutes of quality rather than 70+ minutes of filler!), which flexes an astonishing musical range in its succinct running time. Lead track ‘King Without A Crown’ gallops out of the starting gate all guns blazing, as Meryl Hamilton and Nick Brown’s duelling six-strings dazzle over the gritty, ground-shaking rhythms provided by Ash Moulton (bass) and Matt Jolly (drums). Vocalist Lawrence Case channels Appetite-era Axl on numbers like ’Mary Jane’ with such ease that Gilby Clarke was compelled to invite him onstage to perform ’It’s So Easy’ during a recent UK tour. On ‘What I Pay’ meanwhile, the singer’s heartfelt delivery to Nick’s show-stopping acoustic slide prove Voodoo Vegas can play the blues every bit as well as they can turn out high-octane rock numbers.
Lawrence draws on the bitter life experience of being jilted at the alter for ’Lost In Confusion’ – a song which started life as a letter to his runaway bride, written at the suggestion of the friend who joined him on what would have been the honeymoon holiday. On record, Lawrence’s letter morphs into a swooping tour-de-force ballad, which is topped off with the legendary lung power of Stevie Vann Lange, known for her work with the likes of Def Leppard and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band.
Personified in ‘The Rise Of Jimmy Silver’s’ cover art by noted comic book artist Jim Boswell as a city-smashing, axe-toting rocker, ‘Jimmy Silver’ is a straight-up celebration of the sheer love of rock ‘n’ roll which has fuelled Voodoo Vegas‘ progress so far already. ‘The Rise Of Jimmy Silver, an album as ripe with the scent of vital new blood as the breakthrough efforts of either The Darkness or The Answer, looks all set to launch Voodoo Vegas into hard rock’s heady stratosphere.
You can hear all of their influences (fans of any of them will love this album) but at no stage do Voodoo Vegas resort to simply being sound alike replicas. In fact for you would think these boys grew up on the Sunset Strip of the 1980s rather than being a bunch of lads and a lass from Bournemouth. Rip roaring, blistering (and slightly sleazy rock n roll – ain’t that what it’s supposed to be?
“The Rise of Jimmy Silver” is released on 4th March
More information at; www.voodoovegas.com
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