Ash Grunwald - Hot Mama Vibes

7 June 2010 by Richard Wilson

Ash Grunwald returns with Hot Mama Vibes, the fifth album and third to take cues from hip hop production.

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As we all start to rug up for the winter, summer festival mainstay Ash Grunwald returns with Hot Mama Vibes. Returning yet again to his finely honed amalgamation of rock/blues and hip hop tendencies, fans of 2008's Fish Out Of Water or 2006's Give Signs won't find themselves too surprised.

Hot Mama Vibes is a much rawer, more frantic outing than his past couple of albums, achieving that same sound of pulsating drum beats and searing guitar solos with a lot less polish. Walking (the first single from the album) and Tear The Roof Off lead the way and for all intents and purposes could be outtakes from Fish Out Of Water. It's not until the third track Raw that Grunwald really finds a new voice -- things are slowed down with layered industrial percussion  and menacing moans sitting in the background, while searing hot guitar and bluesy vocals march their way through. It's the last minute though where Raw simply takes off with perhaps the best, crunchiest guitar solo Grunwald has put to record.

Grunwald himself recognised the audacity of the album name and title track, Hot Mama Vibes. "It's not something I would have put out there in the past. I would have constrained myself; I wouldn't have felt comfortable," but ignoring that voice is perhaps the best way to explain Grunwald's current approach to making music.  "This is my fifth album so it was time to just launch in there, do whatever I feel like."

The approach works, and this catchy little track seems to succeed in part because of the disparity between the tight drum and bass sample -- feels like Run-DMC are gonna come out and drop some rhymes at any moment -- and a nonchalant delivery of the vocals that include everything from call and response between Grunwald and on-the-phone-Grunwald and a spoken word warning that brings to mind his earlier "Dolphin Song".

Ash Grunwald has never far from the blues that dominated his style in early years, and Mind Playing Tricks might just be his best work in the genre yet. The first 30 seconds are toe-tapping fun, but when it's all-in with the percussion and hand-claps things are kicked up a notch and you feel like you're in the funkiest juke joint out. The dark Lady Luck, replete with soaring, distant B.B. King-esque guitar riffs and a simple piano sample that gives the track a lounge music feel. It's perhaps the most low-key track on the album but at the same time it is bursting with so much goodness that sums up Ash Grunwald perhaps better than anything he's ever recorded before: the bluesy guitar, the samples and junkyard percussion, the blues meets hip hop vocal delivery and the distant megaphone wailing that takes a page from Tom Waits' Franks Wild Years.

As the album winds down, Never Let You Go is a great closer for Hot Mama Vibes. Chilled electric piano sets the groove while minimal guitars crunch out some funk, and then thrown on top we have just the right amount of vocals before launching into a tight Ribot-meets-King guitar send-out.

Hot Mama Vibes is a natural albeit cautious progression in Ash Grunwald's sound. Half of the album sort of  feels like variations of the same themes -- these will probably be the tracks that find themselves getting a hefty working in a few months when things heat up and it's festival time again -- but it's the other half a dozen or so tracks where the injection of new approaches pays off from the approach of a studio album.

If you liked his previous couple of albums, Hot Mama Vibes won't disappoint. If you wanted to see some evolution to the sound, Hot Mama Vibes won't disappoint.

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