I’ve had the pleasure of assisting Lonesome Chris Todd and his colleagues in the Hardchargers towards a debut album this year (nationally released on October 27).
Lonesome Chris has also been making occasional forays into solo performance lately, magically wrangling this 12-string beast and field-hollering his blues in unsuspecting bar-rooms around Northern Ireland.
This video was shot recently in the Toddfather’s apartment. Obviously, Chris himself lives not in a well-heeled plush environment but in a shotgun shack down a dirt road by a cotton plantation (actually, that’s not *too* far from accuracy…. okay, he lives on the sleepy far edge of a country town, down a cul-de-sac beside a marshy meadow…).
‘No Stone Unturned’, in an 11-minute smouldering electric form is one of the highlights of the forthcoming album, ‘Scarecrow’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNoRb9Fr568&feature=youtu.be
Well sorry but that’s really awful to my ears. Why on earth is he playing a 12 string? In open tuning? It’s just a horrid unlistenable jangly noise. And I can’t understand a word he’s saying.
Er – singing.
Much as I love the independent/local/ordinary guy doing his shit kind of thing – I just can’t enjoy this.
Sitting on the fence, Mouse?
Perhaps Chris’ style won’t be for everyone but the blues has no end of previous in the declamatory stakes. Here’s Charley Patton:
And would you be the one, Mouse, to have told Lead Belly, Cyril Davies and Jimi Hendrix to get rid of their 12-strings? Surely not! 🙂
No complaints about the guitar playing from me. It’s pretty much how that sort of stuff is/was done. His voice is what put me off. It was a bit too aggressive-shouty-punk and did to me what fingernails on glass does to some other people. I had to bail after about 3 minutes. Couldn’t take any more.
Not enough lower end in the voice. Maybe just the way/location it was recorded? That kind of blues needs to be more growly, I think.
I think it’s the room, Mike – trust me, Chris can growl with the best of ’em. The album version is deep… not trebley…