Last Week's Recording Reviews

Little Victor – Deluxe Lo-Fi – Rhythm Bomb Records RBR 5886

Oh my god, do I implore you to imagine in your blues-loving mind the harshest, foulest, stormiest, and most distinctive interpretation of unpretentious boogie blues, and immediately and completely delegate your brainwaves to a bluesman named Little Victor!  His strain of the music seeps with authenticated saunter and significant influence that undoubtedly and firmly clenches listeners from his initial distorted and warped guitar notes, grasping and imprisoning them right up until the last tone tails off, sending them disrobed of how they beforehand supposed self-possessed boogie blues was defined.

There is a drippy, hot-and-sweaty swampy, backwaters nightfall characteristic to all of Little Victor’s blues powers, whether they be unfurled in his rowdily twisted and bent guitar routes, his scandalous and fatty harmonica brayings, or his barely recognizable vocal ejections.  Little Victor’s blues charter is akin to John Lee Hooker having an infant that was reared by R.L. Burnside who compelled him to endlessly listen to Junior Kimbrough while perusing a digest on Louisiana Swamp Blues while also studying abstract art in a lecture delivered by Frank Frost.  No one today grants the blues so unconventionally and with such style, cool, and listener pleasure as Little Victor.

Born into a U.S. military family, and eventually calling much of the European landmass home, along with a wide ribbon of the U.S., and someone who is eloquent in numerous languages, Little Victor fashions blues to complement the rarified kind of his itinerant blues poetic existence that must dwell in his psyche.  It seems that the utmost musically developmental times for Little Victor were in Memphis where he entertained wherever possible for weeks on end exercising his blues proficiencies.  Ultimately making his way southbound into Mississippi, he appears to have permitted the humid, raw Delta blues to soak into his soul, irrevocably attaining the grand unification that is his personal blues contract.

There is a sassiness to Little Victor’s blues revelations, with his cosmic use of distortion only amplifying the self-assured boogie ilk of his blues stock.  The dark of night seals in as the swamp moss on the trees conceals the moonlight when Little Victor approaches with his arsenal of blues disclosures.  He orates to that dense bog murkiness.

View Little Victor’s co-conspirators here, Kim Wilson, Tomi Leino, Steve Lucky, Jo’ Buddy, Danny Michael, Harpdog Brown, Big Jon Atkinson, and Carl Sonny Leyland, as wholly invested; this troupe knows Little Victor’s scores to settle.

If you want to be utterly washed of hygienic pedestrian blues as is at times uncovered in others’ blues jaunts these days, put this in your CD player and tap your foot, swing and sway, and bob your head in accord affirmed that Little Victor is a sanctioned blues clairvoyant, one we should all bask in.

Hard-hitting stuff!  Pick this one up!  Highly recommended!