A number of years back, The Delta Mud Skipper said, “Dude. Check out Doyle Bramhall. You’ll dig it.” So, I played it and remembered thinking, “Yeah. It’s good,” and then it disappeared from my immediate attention as I went on to something else. Sometime in the past year or so, I started thinking about that exchange and, as if I were the Millennium Falcon caught in the tractor beam of the Death Star, I was powerless to fight the pull of this album. Day by day, I neared closer and closer to Welcome until I finally loaded it into the disc player and pressed the little green button indicating it was time to rock. And rock, did it ever! An hour or so expired, and I sat in a puddle of myself. But, I wasn’t done with just one listen. No . . . Welcome soon became more than just something that I wanted to listen to. It became something that I HAD to listen to. It’s the audio equivalent of heroin. So tasteful. So lovely. So addicting. I stand here before you, a prisoner in the clutches of the all powerful, string bending madness of Doyle Bramhall II, and his musical masterpiece, Welcome.If you think that was a dramatic opener for a review, wait until you hear the opener of the album! “Green Light Girl” kicks off the album with a classic Cream meets Hendrix riff that is hot enough to sear a steak. Capturing the vibe of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s classic rock of Hendrix and Zeppelin, Bramhall adds a fresh sense of urgency to the whole thing. Muted down stroke picking mixed with the occasional sustained flourishes drive the song through the verses before the whole band explodes with emotion at the chorus. As expected with a guitar protégée, the solo to “Green Light Girl” is as incendiary as a 4th of July festivity. Initially starting off as a multi-note flurry, Bramhall eventually drops into emotionally dripping sustained notes of passion that refer back to the original melody of the tune. Up tempo and head bobbin’, “Green Light Girl” is as perfect a rock album opened as there is.
The bluesy swagger of the following track, “Problem Child,” brings back a flood of memories of that stuff I know I’ve heard before. The difference being, Bramhall makes it feel so sudden and important for today. He never makes the music feel as if he’s blatantly ripping off the greats of yester year, but paying homage to, and adding his own distinctive voice to rock ‘n rolls glorious past. The Hendrix inspiration is most certainly littered throughout the tune, but there’s no mistaking that this is the music of present day.
“So You Want It to Rain” is the song that made me stop everything and declare that Welcome is a great album. Yeah . . . I know it’s only the third track on the album, but it could have been the first track and I would have felt the same way. Very rarely is there a song so powerful that it can influence my thoughts this dramatically. Opening with a quiet and subtle guitar passage, Bramhall begins crooning the soulful lyrics of watching the rain with his girl. Stop long enough and you’ll think that you can actually hear the rain falling on a corrugated metal roof as a summer storm rolls through the southern landscape. The song builds to a Zeppelin-esque power, exploding into a shower of sound and distorted excitement, rumbling like the thunder from that southern storm before tapering off and just letting the rain fall. And man, that voice . . . whew! So much emotion packed in there, it’s gotta’ be for real!
Hailing from Austin, Texas, the Bramhall family is deeply rooted with the music scene of the community, specifically the blues. Doyle Bramhall once played alongside Jimmie Vaughn in the Fabulous Thunderbirds and co-founded The Arc Angels with Charlie Sexton, enlisting the aid of Stevie Ray’s rhythm section Double Trouble, for that endeavor. Bluesy? Yeah. But, Welcome isn’t a straight up blues album. Let’s call it what it is . . . a rock album with a bunch of blues influence. “Soul Shaker” comes across as more of a Black Crowes southern rock burner, while “Send Some Love” is a glass of bourbon sipping, gospel infused track. Man . . . feel the emotion coming out of this one! “Smokestack” is a true bluesy burner, tinged with that right amount of social commentary and a riff that immediately tells you that he means what he says. As I hear this tune, I can’t help but think of Marvin Gaye’s "What’s Going On?," but with Hendrix singing it. You gotta’ hear it for yourselves. It’s amazing! The absolute finest moment of Welcome comes with the eleventh track. “This Dream” is an epic if there ever was one. Sounding so much like the acoustic works of Zeppelin, “This Dream” takes the listener on a journey to that time when music was everything and the television was a frivolous accessory that butchered the imagination. Shifting from mellow acoustic passages to more explosive distorted rock, Bramhall channels all of the greats on this one. The emotionally charged solo is as expressive as Jim Carey’s face. The mixture of female vocals with Doyle’s soulful croon add that special, and instantly identifiable something that creates the musical magic of this album. The tune meanders into a quasi-psychedelic piece midway through the song, highlighted by a piano keeping the time while Bramhall tools with the volume on his guitar to create maximum texture. The music captures the essence of the song title perfectly as the musicians let their instruments flow to a fade, like waking from a dream, more refreshed and lighter than when it all started. It’s simply a marvelous tune and one that I can’t get enough of.
If you’re one of those cats that thinks the best music has already been written and recorded by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton, then Doyle Bramhall’s Welcome is the album that you need to hear. Bramhall captures the feel and excitement of all of those great artists that we grew up with, but he’s doing it today. It wasn’t so much that the rock that we call classic died off. People just forgot how to play it right. The soul got sucked out of it when everybody wanted the fame of Jimmy Page, consume massive quantities of illicit substances, and bag as many groupies as humanly possible. These folks forgot about putting their soul into the music. Doyle Bramhall, much like Warren Haynes, puts every fiber of his being into his playing, and the music on Welcome really tells that tale. Absolutely incredible album and one I know will live forever in my collection. It’s so damn good that if someone were to come along and say, “Pope, we’re having a listening party of Doyle Bramhall’s Welcome,” I’d be there with my own copies in every format just in case the party host screwed something up. Doyle . . . thank you for a wonderful listening experience. Skipper . . . thank you for pointing me in the right direction.
-- Pope JTE
Buy here: Welcome
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