Kingcrimsonprog
Black Country Communion is a supergroup who play classic rock music which features Glen Hughes, Jason Bonham, Joe Bonamassa and Derek Sherinian all of whom are gifted musicians and have been involved with high quality, respectable music separately and work really well together within the group.
Their self-titled debut album was released in 2010 and is far from a flimsy and insubstantial collaboration between friends, but is an extremely well put together, lengthy and memorable album that both stands up musically on its own merits and flows well from beginning to end.
In addition to featuring a strong line-up and being in a genre which I enjoy, I think the production job on the record is superb, and everything sounds really great, especially Jason Bonham’s toms.
I had gotten into the band on the release of their second album and a lot of the reviews at the time stated how much better it was to their debut, naturally I assumed the debut would be a little poor but luckily this assumption turned out to be completely wrong.
While still feeling cohesive and complete, the album is far from repetitive and covers a variety of musical ground. Vocals for example, are primarily handled by the very talented Glen Hughes who adds some soul influences to the rock formula but then Joe Bonamassa also sings on four of the songs bringing more of his blues based style into the overall sound.
Tracks such as the Title Track, ‘Beggarman’ and ‘Sista Jane’ are straight up hard and heavy rock numbers, ‘Down Again’ mixes in a little of the Funk feelings of Hughes era Deep Purple and both ’Too Late For The Sun’ and ‘Medusa’ are longer and slower tracks with more keys and atmosphere.
Overall, Black Country Communion are a great band and this debut album is a strong effort that is well produced, musically interesting and stylistically excellent.