Making Music December 1999 ( UK)

Radiotones: Live at the 12 Bar Club, London

The band’s posters describe them as "National guitar-driven acoustic garage blues" – which is a pretty fair desciption of their refreshingly different approach to blues-based music. The gruff, growling vocals and raging , bashing slide style – while a bit of a shock to the system at first –became increasingly engaging and rose to a torrent of energy as the band screamed, cried, bellowed and scratched through a set featuring mostly original material plus a couple of Robert Johnson covers (Travelling Riverside and Come on in my Kitchen) to keep the ‘blues purists’ on side.

On occasion, the band’s own material – such as the swampy two-step ‘She’s Gone’ – veered off the well-beaten blues track, and ‘Pomegranate Heart’ and ‘Devil got my Woman" while still blues based could be said to fall into a kind of trash country category.

Highlights of the gig were no-nonsense, all-hell-broke-loose versions of jitterbug Swing and Preachin’ Blues which ran smoothly into each other and the title track of their debut CD Gravel Road (which I happily paid a tenner for after the gig) was a real crowd-pleaser.

In fact the only thing the band did wrong all evening was refuse to play any encores [good attitude – punk ed.].