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Traditionally, when a band has a little spare studio time while recording an album, they knock out a B-side or two. That is, if they’re not using those precious hours to indulge in extracurricular activities long associated with the profession.
While John Corabi, David Lowy and friends were finishing the recording of last year’s Dead Daisies album of originals Light ’Em Up, though, they felt sufficiently inspired by the heritage of their surroundings in Fame Studios, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to jam a few blues numbers while the mood took them. It might not be the most original idea ever to occur to a band, and anyone who has endured less-than-inspired blues-rock covers in public houses across the country will know that the genre’s simple charm doesn’t always make for thrilling entertainment. But the results depend on the passion and finesse put into the performance.
On that front, Lookin’ For Trouble hits its mark as often as it misses with this 10-song set of standards. They rip into Muddy Waters’ I’m Ready with all the hard-rock gusto and crunching bottom end you’d expect from The Dead Daisies, with guitarist Doug Aldrich letting rip in satisfying style to ice a satisfyingly stodgy cake. That’s an example of the chunka-chunka approach to blues rock working.
It’s less successful on their rendition of Little Red Rooster – perhaps because we’re best used to it being done at a slow, swaggering tempo, speeding it up doesn’t do a lot for it. Similarly, their reading of Freddie King’s Going Down is a stirring one thanks to a feisty rhythm section and a ravenous vocal from Corabi, resembling ZZ Top wired on jailhouse stimulants. Yet while Lead Belly’s Black Betty is laced with lively harmonica, we all know the Ram Jam version, and while The Dead Daisies’ chugging take on it would probably work at 10pm in a liquidly refreshed club setting, on record it’s forgettable.
When they add gospel-ish backing vocals to a bouncing cover of John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom it has a certain rock’n’soul strut, but it’s just a touch too Jools Holland-y compared to the sharp pugilism of the original.
However, two more winners emerge in the shape of a stomping overhaul of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads, and perhaps the album’s brightest highlight, a resonantly soulful stab at B.B. King’s The Thrill Is Gone, which comes into its own via some brilliantly emotive guitar licks and Corabi’s angst-racked vocal delivery.
