Album Notes

ANN ARBOR OBSERVER
May 2001

The Martindales
A hell of a blues band

If I have a favorite neighborhood bar, it would have to be downtown Ypsilanti's Tap Room. Once a sleazy shot-and-a-beer dive, it was transformed a few years back when musician Brian Brickley and his wife, Lisa, bought the business and turned it into the perfect neighborhood blues hangout. There is something about the blues and Ypsilanti that makes them go hand in hand, and the Tap Room captures it perfectly.
Brian Brickley is an excellent saloonkeeper. But while I've known for a long time that he also fronts his own band, the Martindales, I have to admit that I never paid much attention to that side of his work. It was not until a recent cold, windy Saturday night that I found myself in the club with the band and caught a full set.
The Martindales, which includes Brickley on vocals and Fender guitar, Rusty James on bass, Mark Boone on keyboards, and (that night) Curtis Sumpter sitting in on drums, is a typical post-Jeff Beck-Jimmy Page-Eric Clapton electric blues band with plenty of covers and long, extended blues jams, with the keys sometimes sounding like a B-3 organ, at other times like an electric piano. Brickley's guitar was the focus as he showered the audience with some of the most amazing guitar licks I've heard in a local bar in years. I suppose if I hadn't been drinking beer my mouth would have dropped open for the entire set.
My guess is that Brickley listened to the British blues guys, but there is no doubt he learned a few tricks from a wide range of the greats. At times he's doing some straight head B. B. King riffs. Other times there's some Luther Anderson thunder and fire. On other songs Brickley slips into a smooth T-Bone Walker shuffle, and then he downshifts on the next song into a Robert Cray mode. But the amazing thing here is that he takes all this stuff, adds a smooth pop covering to it, and makes it his own. The bonus here is Brickley's cool blue-eyed southern rock voice, much like Gregg Allman's. His voice has both grit and a casual soulfulness, and his singing is intense with a sweet country edge.
To cap it off, Brickley writes some damn good originals, too. He did only a couple the night I saw him, but the band's eponymous new debut CD is loaded with fresh and very listenable tunes, from "Quietly Hold Me," a sad and mournful ballad Eric Clapton might wish he'd written, to the street-smart "9 mm Brother."
The Martindales are one hell of a blues band. I hope it doesn't take the rest of the world as long as I did to figure this out. You can catch them at the Tap Room for their CD release party on Saturday, May 12.
-Alan Goldsmith