When thunder ripples through the sky, the sea begins to froth and boil and all of the local kids stop dead in their tracks and boogie in a trance-like state, you know somebody near by is playing the new Blues Ambush album.
For those that are unfamiliar, Blues Ambush is a monstrous power-trio from Philadelphia, made up of Ken Brenninger of Fully Glazed and Storks on guitar, Jesse Sheppard of Elkhorn and Jeffrey Alexander & The Heavy Lidders on bass and Dave Siebert of Jackie-o-Motherfucker on drums. They create sprawling acid rock behemoths that chug along with the force of a crashing tsunami and the volume of a band three times their size.
On this release, the trio rips through two dirty side-long jams that spark and detonate with irradiated riffs, molten bass-lines and clobbering beats. Both tracks smolder and hiss with a lo-fi production quality, which really emphasizes the album’s murky bad-trip atmosphere.
On Side A, “A Disorienting Light,” saunters slowly with the immensity of a towering kaiju, eventually revving up to a rabid speed, while Brenninger produces blazing solos over the primal rhythms laid out by Sheppard and Siebert.
Meanwhile, the untitled jam on the flip side growls like a starved beast, with some Hendrixian wah-wah freak outs and bass grooves that could rattle buildings into pure dust. The tune builds from a sludgy stomp to a turbulent whirlwind within its thirteen-minute run time (which somehow still feels too short…), often threatening to careen off of the rails into utter chaos.
Heads that dig the seismic riffs of Endless Boogie, the elemental jamming of Träd, Gräs och Stenar and the devilish instrumentation of proto-metal bands like Sir Lord Baltimore, Leaf Hound and good ol’ Sabbath will be obsessed with Blues Ambush. Get your copy here and let your obsession start today.
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