Outlaws
Diablo Canyon

THE REVIEW

Finally, after eight years of absence from the music market, guitarist and soul of the group Hughie Thomasson reassembled the pieces of this Florida southern rock formation in 1994, finding three brand-new companions and a few illustrious colleagues and friends available for a guest appearance (Gary Rossington and Billy Powell from Lynyrd Skynyrd, for instance). With the major record labels that invested in the band through the 1980s now out of sight, it's the very active Mike Varney, an omnipresent discoverer and promoter of talented guitarists of all kinds, from metal downwards, who invested in this return. The budget is limited (as evidenced by the sloppy cover photo, followed inside the album by standard Excel-style lettering…) because Varney is not a billionaire, but thanks to him, the Outlaws manage to break a long discographic fast, reforming as a two-guitar quartet and releasing this low-budget album with consequently limited distribution. Such a pity… it's one of the best in their fifty-year career!

The tour de force (seven minutes, and guitar solos as if they're pouring down), which opens and also titles the work, is a typical Thomasson song in his favorite key of E minor: 30% of what we've already heard on previous records, but with nice choruses, extreme determination, and guitars full of grit and harmonic fullness.

In the swift "Let the Fingers Do the Talkin’" the much-missed Thomasson, unattractive as he was talented, lets his arm go, as one would say in tennis jargon. That is, he frees his fingers, as the title of the piece somehow warns, and it's a great path… no wonder Hughie was nicknamed Flame by colleagues and supporters, precisely because of his ability to produce bursts of notes, torrents of tight scales on the keyboard, in the manner of virtuosic country but with the thunderous amplification and full bite of rock.

Thomasson's new, yet another guitar colleague for this Outlaws discography episode, a certain Chris Hicks, is also quite sharp on the instrument… You can discern this on both "Macon Blues" and "The Wheel," where he showcases a truly hoarse vocal style, closely tied to rhythm & blues. There is an extreme energy and desire throughout, even if the repertoire flows somewhat conventionally and is not very memorable, in the sense that the pieces are thoroughly enjoyed but quickly forgotten, as they are not endowed with melodies or chord progressions, arrangements, or rhythms that are even slightly surprising or at least irresistible.

Full marks then for this very isolated Outlaws release of the nineties. It's a solid four-star affair, but we're in the beloved decade of the triumph of those in flannel shirts, and the seventies rock of "Diablo Canjon" is out of fashion without yet becoming "classic," as is now the case.

So, almost no one pays attention to it, and the group is forced to disperse again, especially since Thomasson definitely decides to accept the offer from the reformed Lynyrd Skynyrd and joins that famous lineup to replace the departing Ed King, who was as swift with a Stratocaster as he was. He'll stay there nearly a decade until he's fed up with playing the bouncy, immortal riff of "Sweet Home Alabama" every night and starts thinking about his Outlaws again… but that's a story for another time.