It’s hard to believe, but Heavy Load Blues, while Gov’t Mule’s eleventh album, is their first ever blues effort and, as befitting the world’s premiere jam band, it features a mix of original pieces and covers from luminaries as varied as Tom Waits, Bobby Bland, Ellmore James and Junior Wells. Recorded live in the studio to 2” tape, the album (produced by Warren Haynes and John Paterno), you get a sense that Gov’t Mule are as keen to pay tribute to their heroes sonically as they are musically, and the album has a rich depth that is custom made for the modern vinyl resurgence.
As you might expect from Gov’t Mule, authenticity is the key in all of their musical endeavours, and this wonderful tribute to the blues is no exception. The album opens with a crackly take on Leroy Carr’s Blues Before Sunrise, all gritty guitar and rippling keys, nailed by a rock-solid beat to which you just can’t help stamping your feet. Like some long-lost recording from the thirties, there’s a rawness to Gov’t Mule’s performance that makes you long for a simpler era, when computers were the farthest thing from any studio’s arsenal, and it certainly kicks the album off in style. The band introduce some gorgeously lazy brass to the mix on the soulful Hole In My Soul, which sounds like Henry Mancini going head to head with Nina Simone. It’s a wonderfully dusty track, given all the greater weight by Warren Haynes’ impassioned vocal, and it provides the perfect follow up to Blues Before Sunrise. The easy beat of Wake Up Dead is up next which, with its organ snatches and tasteful lead work, recalls Clapton’s early work. The Delta stomp of Love Is A Mean Old World is an album highlight, boasting a distorted vocal, sweet slide work and a sudden sideways slip into Tom Waits territory as the piano comes into play. It’s a fantastic song that effortlessly gets under the skin. The tone changes again as the band dig into Junior Wells’ catalogue for a medley of Snatch It Back And Hold It / Hold It Back / Snatch It Back And Hold It. A simple, trad blues with one hell of a swing, the recording style and performance once again make you double take, just to make sure this truly isn’t some time capsule dug up by the band, and it says much of the timelessness of the music to which they’re paying tribute that it still sounds fresh some sixty years after it was written. A slightly more surprising choice of cover is Bobby Bland’s evergreen Ain’t No Love In The heart Of The City, not because it isn’t a fantastic song (of course it is), but because it has been covered so often over the years, not least by Whitesnake who have rather made it their own. In truth, while gov’t Mule do a perfectly fine job, they offer little to the track that hasn’t been heard before, and so we’re on to Charles Otis, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s (Brother Bill) Last Clean Shirt (originally recorded by Honeyman), for a gritty, dirty blues that brings the first half of the album to its conclusion.
Opening the second half of the album, the band opt for a brilliantly dark cover of Tom Waits’ Make It Rain. Heavily distorted, but with that fundamental groove lurking beneath the noise, Make It Rain is another highlight, and it says much of the source material that it instantly screams “Waits” the moment the band kick it into gear. Heading into acoustic territory, the album’s title track is a desert blues, stripped to the bone and bleached in the blazing sun. With a pounding back beat and wah-inflected bass, Ann Peebles’ soul classic Feel Like breaking Up Somebody’s Home (via Albert King’s classic reading) comes thundering into view. Rendered with more subtlety than some, Gov’t Mule have maintained the original’s dusky vibe and, if the solos are beautifully restrained, they build to a hell of a crescendo. Reclaiming an old track, Gov’t Mule offer up a new reading of If Heartaches Were Nickels, written by Warren, but originally performed by Kenny Neal back in 1994. A well-travelled song, it has been covered a good many times over the years, but it’s certainly a treat to hear Warren tackling the piece with his band after so many years. With a super-dirty distortion, Gov’t Mule offer up a brutally ravaged version of Howlin’ Wolf’s I Asked For Water (She Gave Me Gasoline), and oh boy does it hit the spot. A nine-minute epic built around a brutally minimalist riff, it allows for some of the album’s hardest edged lead work. It leaves the short, acoustic Black Horizon to see things out. A subtly rendered palette cleanser that feels like it should have been recorded on a porch in the deep South, it’s exactly the conclusion the album needed and, as the record spins to a stop, it’s like returning to the present, having been drawn on a journey through the past over the course of the preceding hour.
Gov’t Mule, it seems, are incapable of producing a bad album. Part of the secret of their longevity is their ability to adapt to a variety of different forms (see: Scho-Mule and Dub Side Of The Mule), while still keeping hold of their own, unique style. Even when you consider that, for Gov’t Mule, passion is everything and every album a labour of love, there’s something special about this blues set, and everything from the delivery to the production is designed to transport the listener away from the everyday to a long lost world of fuzzy tape recordings and live, in-studio performances. For Mule fans and blues’ fans both, this is a wonderful album. 9/10
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