EP Review: Aaron Carpenter and The Revelators

/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;

Blues music can be a hard sell in todays market; rendering itself as more of a lifestyle than a genre, the blues requires a bit more from its listeners. You need to subscribe to the legends of artists selling their souls to the devil in exchange for guitar mastery.

Waiheke’s own blues masters Aaron Carpenter and The Revelators may not have sold their souls yet, but they have just released their self–titled EP and it’s a bit of a doozy.

Never Hungry Long opens with crunchy guitar and a wailing solo. The drums don’t sound quite as ‘full’ as I would have expected, but carry the song well enough. Perhaps the greatest part of the piece though, is actually the backing vocals on the chorus – they lift the feel of the whole song. Stranger opens slower in tempo, a lamenting piece that eventually takes on an almost gospel blues feel. The transition into the next song The Hardest Thing feels a little abrupt, and the song itself is more a step in the country/blues direction than anything else on the record, but harbours the most resonant lyric “forgiving yourself is the hardest thing”. The closing piece Pony is the shortest song on the release (clocking in at under two minutes) and the most upbeat, but feels underdeveloped.

Lyrically, none of the themes are especially new – Women who done you wrong, strangers, forgiving yourself, but overall the EP is a solid first release and I look forward to future work from these guys.