The Immortal Lee County Killers - These Bones Will Rise to Love You Again

Genre rock Publisher Tee Pee Records External Links Official Website Tee Pee Records

These Bones is a musical equivalent to a punch in the face. An aurally pleasing punch, that is.

If you have not heard of The Immortal Lee County Killers, their third album (full title: These Bones Will Rise to Love You Again) will knock you over and make you wonder why you haven't heard of them before. Sometimes a band is afforded room for experimentation, from a solo or a fill here and there, but there is no room for that with The Immortal Lee County Killers, every ounce of effort is put forth into that particular song, rushing it full force and, quite possibly, down your throat.

Still featuring undertones of blues and psychedelia in their music, the ILCK pack a lot of styles into These Bones, and they manage to seamlessly blend them all together to make them a cohesive album effort. Few pauses allow the listener to take in the sonic blast from wobbly Moog on "Blues" to the assault of "Boom Boom," or even from the electrified ballad of "Lights Down Low" into the acapella of "No More My Lord." These eleven songs bludgeon the listener.

What the ILCK do best is sound ragged without losing focus, and it is in full display on "Turn on the Panther." At first the drumming is roughshod, the guitars are madly effect driven, and the vocals are all on a different level, but somehow, together, they make a madly cohesive blues-rock song. Clearly they are leaving it all on the tape.

One thing that ILCK does seem to do haphazardly here is to come dangerously close to Deep Purple territory. Now, I'm not talking "Knocking at Your Backdoor" songs, but the reliance on the heavy Moog synth on "Blues" and "Airliner." It's just very reminiscent of the classic rock dinosaur, and however invalid this comparison is, it's the first thing I thought of when hearing it. Of course the plodding "Blues" sounded like a "When the Levee Breaks" (in half the time) kind of song, so maybe I can let it pass.

Loud when they want to be, sullen at other times, These Bones is a concise sampling of what distorted blues rock in the 21st century should sound like. Of course, The Immortal Lee County Killers are ignominiously trailblazing on that front.