Groundhogs
Blues Obituary

A prophetic title and image: it’s 1969, is the blues dead? Hendrix has flown to increasingly avant-garde realms, but he won't have much longer to live, and the Cream have parted ways with resentment. Joplin will be left with an incomplete album before being overwhelmed by her vices. Perhaps, in that year, the aforementioned genre wasn't entirely deceased but had rather returned to the shadows, overshadowed by the psychedelic and/or proto-progressive vanguards of the rock scene. Even the Groundhogs, a subterranean group of the so-called British Invasion, extend their condolences to the genre. We are at the dawn of the seventies, and Deep Purple, Zeppelin, and Sabbath cannot wait.

The music contained in this “Blues Obituary” presents itself as (indeed) a blues vaguely tinged with hard and with heavy lysergic reminiscences (see the Hendrixian “Light Was The Day”), characterized by a solid and valuable guitar work by Tony McPhee, as well as his dark and visceral vocal timbre; both characteristics are evident in the dry and hypnotic progression of the lovely “Mistreated,” perhaps the standout track of the work in terms of immediacy. The guitar doesn’t present Cream-like distortion, remaining restrained even in its dirty and gritty riffs, while the rhythm supports the tracks with decent creativity.

All the pieces maintain a very respectable quality, and one that many aspire to, but perhaps it lacks THE composition that alone would be worth the price of the LP, and the good half hour passes pleasantly, without true and proper jolts that would place the work among the most influential and well-known albums of the era. Somewhere between the rawer blues debuts and the angry rock of the subsequent (“Thanks Christ For The Bomb”), “Blues Obituary” remains very interesting and balanced in its ingredients, showing its wrinkles with dignity. A work where the musicians are more valuable than the songs themselves, where creativity is free to experiment without overturning the basics of a genre.

A 3.5 happily rounded up.