Gambling Machine
author: Daniel Pavlica (www.throcktologist.com)
Employing the extraordinary guitar playing skills of one Lewis Hamilton, the energy of this power trio should make immediate contact with blues rock audiences. Lewis Hamilton and the Boogie Brothers are sort of a family run enterprise, with Lewis’s father Nick on bass, as the family connection grows even stronger with the guitarist’s cousin Steve handling piano and even drums on some occasions. But this is far from being a comfy, free of excitement family gathering. With Lewis at the helm, surrounded by excellent musicianship helping him in steering in the right direction, The Boogie Brothers are an ominous blood bond assembly.
What makes this album interesting is the amount of good ideas and the care with which these are executed. The song writing being the album's strong point (apart from the unexpected twist in mood brought with “The Getaway”), there’s a lot of excitement to be enjoyed here, whether you prefer to get funky (the excellently improvised piece “Phatitude” will soon sort that problem out), or your heart is set for more heavy, mainstream blues rock (check out the chunky “Life on the Road”). Despite Lewis’s relatively early age, he is playing with defiant maturity. Instead of attempting to dominate the proceedings, he breathes as one with the band, absorbing every ounce of the band's energy, thus allowing ideas to multiply like some awkward bacterial growth. His guitar outbursts are superbly controlled, settling neatly with jazzy inspired tunes of “I Got to Know” and “Woke up This Morning”, coping brilliantly with his cousin's somewhat refined piano solo. Hamilton’s guitar playing is exquisite to say the least, but it is his performance on “Crying Shame” that delivers true revelation, as Lewis unleashes a tortured solo, in which strings are bent and hammered in a relentless assault of passion.
Cramped by low budget production and certain imperfections traced in Lewis’s voice, “Gambling Machine” may feel uncomfortable for some blues rock purists to deal with, still there’s no denying the fact that this is one heck of a line-up, with healthy ideas brewing and on hand knowledge of the ways for crafting them into a real work of art. Carry on lads!
8 out of 10
Daniel Pavlica (www.rocktologist.com)
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