(Photo: Emma Gillett)
Australian artist and guitar ace Hamish Anderson is almost singlehandedly reviving a genre we used to fondly call “rock”.
His new album ELECTRIC will remind you a bit of The Foo Fighters and Led Zep’s Jimmy Page. But my favorite track is “Everybody”, which has a bluesy John Lennon feel.
Anderson’s album got me musing about the decline of rock in general. It’s ironic that the radio format “Classic Rock” is still going strong, even as Baby Boomers get closer to the final curtain call. Most Boomers are perfectly content listening to Tom Petty’s “Freefallin’” and The Eagles’ “Hotel California” for the eight billionth time. You’d think they would be at least a little curious about artists like Hamish Anderson.
Meanwhile, most Millennials have little allegiance to rock, and the young people who still listen tend to favor the “take no prisoners” hardcore sound of bands like Knocked Loose versus the blues/rock masters like Stevie Ray Vaughn.
That leaves a handful of artists like Hamish Anderson to carry on the tradition of midtempo melodic rockers (Beatles/Stones) and riff-heavy bands like Deep Purple and Led Zep.
Anderson co-produced his new album with David Davis (The War On Drugs) and enlisted the help of Jessy Green, who has played strings on Foo Fighters albums. The aim was to modernize Seventies rock and make it more palatable to young people who never heard Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton.
That’s a tall order, because 95% of today’s YouTube videos show young artists noodling around on a synth rather than coaxing sounds from a six-string.
Nevertheless, the twelve songs on Anderson’s ELECTRIC album show why rock was the heartbeat of the music biz for so many decades. For example, his guitar work on “Stir Crazy” feels like a tribute to Deep Purple’s extraordinary axe-man Ritchie Blackmore.
So if you’re tired of hearing AC/DC’s “Back In Black” for the umpteenth time, check out this fab collection.
When the rock spirit meets great songwriting, amazing things can happen.
