Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The temptation to place a pair of two fingers aloft in the air in a grand gesture of defiance and bold rebellion has arguably passed the thought of all in the last few years, some for more nefarious reasons than others, but for many the sheer untethered anger that comes from having to shrink into the sunset, to accepting that we live in a world ravaged by the ill thinking that comes with unregulated conviction that those who reside in Death Valley deserve to feel no shade, no sense of paradise, is nothing short of monstrous.
Anger and depression are finely linked, it takes courage to understand that to feel one you must therefore accept the other exists, and it is a human experience that we have largely forgotten until the last couple of years, and when we as a whole look to the blissfully ignorant as they continue ravaging the minds of our brethren, as they insist on more than their fair share.
To feel the anger of those even denied a Death Valley Paradise is to rise up and demand change, not one to be whispered as if half afraid to wake the dragon lest it turns on you, but with full voice and tension splitting guitars, a spirit, a demand of non-cooperation whilst fully emboldening the majority to take arms with fingers held high and drum sticks pounding out a beat that is harder, more furious than the heart can cope with.
For The Kris Barras Band, the Death Valley Paradise is one in which the lines are drawn, the sense of occasion is brutally cool and delivered with the seismic aftershock that tears down towering edifices that have stood for a millennium or more, and with a new rhythm section consisting of Billy Hammett on drums and Kelpie Mackenzie on bass joining Kris Barras and Josiah J, Manning, tracks such as My Parade, Who Needs Enemies, Wake Me When It’s Over, Cigarettes and Gasoline, Hostage, Dead Horses, and Bury Me combine to be the most intriguing and devastating salvo of musical weaponry in which to send directly into the objectionable hearts of those that feel nothing.
Death Valley Paradise is an album where the chains, the shackles, and the handcuffs of oppression have been removed, it is an album of freedom, of exorcising the blind faith of repression in the guise of dominating cruelty. There is almost nothing quite like an album of anger to set the pulse racing, and for The Kris Barras Band this is the release that brings that rage to the fore, and it is welcome, it is compelling, it is the architecture of the free-thinking human.
A great album, The Kris Barras Band have drawn a new line in the sand for which others will not easily, if ever, breach.
The Kris Barras Band release Death Valley Paradise on March 4th via Mascot Records/Mascot Label Group
Ian D. Hall