Miss Quincy & The Showdown--- On the Road to Recovery

What goes well with a new album release? A video of course! And Miss Quincy & The Showdown worked really hard shooting TWO new videos to go with the release, but improbable disaster struck. The drive containing the video footage was stolen in Vancouver in a vehicle break-in, and the back-up drive that contained a copy has mysteriously gone missing. The search for the missing drives has been extensive but it's looking like the amazing videos that could have been, are lost forever...

Sounds like a conspiracy to me, but then practically everything does these days.  Even the music, sometimes (I mean, Robin Thicke?  WTF?), but you get the lowdown from The Showdown (okay, it sucks, but I've had thirteen cups of coffee and have been streaming Roadside Recovery for the past four hours and am scrambling to finish this review before I collapse in a pool of caffeine and sweat, so cut me some slack).  I would delete the beginning of this but I hate to lose four hours work, though work it wasn't.  What it was was a trip through the fifties to present day via a blues-influenced trio of ladies who rock.  Well, not really blues, but Rhythm & Blues, which is not quite the same thing.

I always shudder when people confuse blues with R&B.  To me, they are very separate genres, though they do overlap in places.  Such is not the case here, though.  From note one of Roadside Recovery, Miss Quincy rares back and let's us have it with both barrels, Bad Love straight out of George Thorogood territory--- basic and primal.  If this isn't R&B, it's rock.

A personal favorite is Talkin' Trash, a throwback to the late fifties and early sixties R&B ballads helped along by just the right amount of guitar echo and reverb.  The sound is pure nostalgia for myself, having grown up with that sound of pre-soul R&B in my ears.  This is AM gold, if only AM were what it used to be.

The best lines in a song are from Damn You.  Slower and vampish, Quincy sings "This one's gonna hurt/This could be the worst of it/This could be the time when/My heart up and bursts/Oh, this one's gonna hurt."   Wrap it in the over-reverbed guitar and slow plodding rhythm and you have a hit.  Or what would have been when hits weren't designed by machines.

The band works out of Vancouver and once again I shake my head at the thought of so many worthwhile bands confined within the province of British Columbia.  The city and surrounding areas are loaded, I tell you.  Almost makes me want to live there, but I don't think I could adjust to putting "eh?' behind every statement.  And it seems like only yesterday we got rid of the embarrassment of George W. and The Dick.  I'm sorry, but as much as idiots down here don't like Obama (the operating word here being 'idiots'), I wouldn't trade him for Harper.  Not even with future draft choices thrown in.  

Frank O Gutch Jr.

(Frank Gutch Jr. writes and has written for numerous magazines and websites, presently including this blog, his own website and the prestigious Don't Believe A Word I Say site put together by musician and music pundit Bob Segarini, out of Toronto. He specializes in the Indies, having fought hand-to-hand combat with major record labels for decades (talk about zombies). He believes music should be the core of the music business, though business it mostly be, and denies the accepted reality in the stead of the artistic one. Seldom does he receive pay for articles and/or reviews and believes that there is no place for negatives in a world in which one cannot keep up with the positives. He is, in a sense, a lost soul in a sea of music, drowning, but drowning gratefully.)