Catl - Soon This Will All Be Gone (Independent)

Toronto’s infamous raw blues trio catl return with a stellar new LP Someday All This Will Be Gone , a dank battery of house rockers that are thickly marinated in southern delta blues boogie. Last I checked, the band was a two-piece, comprised of singer/guit-tar picker Jamie Fleming and drummer Johnny Larue , they’ve added keys and more vocals with Sarah Kirkpatrick and ex-*Deadly Snakes* member Andrew Moszynski replacing Johnny on the skins. It’s a great combo of players that has produced a Canadian take on the down-home Delta blues of the American South of the 20s through to the 60s.
Opener intro “Kassie Jones” draws on some Memphis Jug Band jams to set the scene for the pickin’ and grinnin’ that follows. We go electric boogie-woogie on “Gold Tooth Shine”, which slow-burns it’s way into increasingly raucous choruses. “Talk Too Much Blues” uses frenetic acoustic strumming and a pulsing kick to push the song forward, country fried vocal harmonies evoking all manner of dusty roads and cotton fields flashing by. From here we torque up to a higher gear on “Got a Thing For You”, that brings the boogie to a full tilt, and you just know the party would erupt at this point, the destroyed burn of guitar moved along like a freight train by the shakers and blues harp, Kirkpatrick’s voice commands and owns the stage here. We plateau on the seething and epically building “Cinderblock”, fully situated in John Lee Hooker territory but with amps completely shredded. “He’ll Make A Way” allows for collective catching of breath with a lilting and mellower gospel ride before amping back up for an organ driven shuffle on “5 Miles”. After this, a paradoxically slow paean of “Cocaine” which makes use of the original Reverend Gary Davis ode as the basis for this bitter libretto on the devil’s dandruff. “Get Outta My Car” brings it on home with some straight up 12 bar raw blues rhythm n boogie and finishes on a snippet of Leadbelly‘s lullaby “Goodnight, Irene”.
Totally well paced and dynamic, Soon All This Will Be Gone is a fun as shit revival of all the best aspects of delta blues and swampy jams. If there is anything right about music these days, it’s the proliferation of bands that are looking past the embarrassment of “festival blues” cheesy wankery to mine the depths of some of the best and most visceral music ever created. Though closer to the Mississippi River of Eastern Ontario than that of the Southern Delta region, catl have that muddy water in their bodies and souls, and that’s what makes their newest album shine.