TAROCK MUSIC

After a stint in the late 70’s and early 80’s, the bluesy duo The Reds faded into obscurity only to revive their garage rock/blues-laden career in 2007.  A follow-up album came in 2009 and saw keyboardist Bruce Cohen release a solo album.  Not to be outdone, Shaffer has released his own solo LP, Necessary Illusion, a 10-track DIY, distortion dynamo featuring Shaffer’s trade reverb blues guitar and throwback vocal delivery.

Title track Necessary Illusion gives you a snapshot of the album ethos . . . dirty, drone blues combined with tons of guitar fuzz and 60’s garage elements.  The “tin can-ish” percussion keeps the simple backing beat and allows the guitar wails and Shaffer’s hard luck vocal delivery to stand at the foreground.

Burnin’ Hell opens to stomping percussion and Shaffer’s wailing tremolo and slide work.  The fuzz is tuned down on this track but is laden with string bending (if not “string busting”) fills and intermittent bent backing howls and moans.  Shakin’ Hips simply put is the dirtiest of dirty blues.  The guitar sounds soaked in lament and turmoil. The lyrical content reeks of defeat and their delivery is downtrodden.  The true mood-changer of the album, this track almost hurts.

Forget everything you know about Jon Spencer and his Blues Explosion.  This Rick Shaffer and his “Blues Annihilation” and he’s the real deal.  A true product of the era, Shaffer combines 60’s garage with the lowest of lowdown blues to achieve a sound that no one is pursuing.  His guitar work is uncanny and sounds more like he’s conjuring demons from it, rather than playing it.  So that being said, congratulations Rick, you just garnered the first 4.5 rating that this writer has ever given (EVER).  Buy it, listen on repeat and love the raw dirt of the sound is the only advice I can give.  Because that’s what I intend to do.

• Chris West, Skope Magazine, 2010

From the city of Philadelphia comes Rick Shaffer’s Necessary Illusion solo debut.  It’s sonically descended from his recent Reds work with Bruce Cohen, and this album is totally Shaffer’s baby.  He does almost everything himself, apart from some additional bass and percussion on a few tracks.

The music is steeped in ’60s garage rock and dirty blues, with a grimy, bottom-of-the-swamp sound, and approaches proto-punk.  Think Stooges and Cramps, and throw in the occasional Neil Young wail or old Stones vibe.

A couple of songs manage to break this mold: Burnin’ Hell is the album’s fastest, most percussive song, Johnny Cash-meets-The Stooges, while Can’t Go On is its cheeriest and poppiest, with resolute Iggy Pop/Mick Jagger vocals over an It’s Not Unusual bass line.  The rest offer little variation in composition or arrangement, with several unfolding over languid, “Fever” like grooves.

Opener Lucky Day sets the template, with ghostly blues guitar rising from a fog of fuzzy devil bass a la The Cramps.  Gettin’ Deeper, has Neil Young-y vocals and slow dingy guitar.  If The Stooges and Cramps had made a song together, all the way down to Iggy Pop and The Cramps’ Lux Interior somehow melding voices, that song would be Two Weeks.  Shakin’ Hips offers some of the dirtiest blues around, with a slow, moaning guitar, scraping barrel-bottoms of pain and grief, slithering over a doleful bass.

Maybe the most interesting thing about Necessary Illusion is how Shaffer’s voice moves so fluidly between Pop, Interior, Jagger and Young, depending the song.  It’s like a holograph changing with the viewer’s angle of observation.

• Jody McCutcheon, CHARTattack, Toronto, Canada, 2010

It’s unusual how Philadelphia duo The Reds disappeared after a brief career in the late-Seventies and early Eighties, just to come back more active than ever with their comeback album, Fugitives From The Laughing House, in 2007.  They followed this impressive second coming two years later with, Early Nothing.  The same year, keyboarder Bruce Cohen did his first solo album One BC, but guitarist/vocalist Rick Shaffer didn’t let us wait long for his own album titled Necessary Illusion.

Without Cohen’s spooky keyboards the psychedelic component is gone giving Shaffer ample opportunity to dig deeper in his roots, which predominantly are garage rock and blues.  Apart from singing, he is also in charge of the very reverb heavy guitar, the bass and the percussion which have this kind of tinny sound, full of clanging hi-hats, that are reminiscent of a time when music wasn’t about getting a more powerful and dynamic production with every new album.  That doesn’t mean that Necessary Illusion sounds bad.  In fact the artist captures perfectly the mood of Sixties garage rock, with his edgy vocals adding to the effort’s credibility.

The ten songs are all faithfully more or less three minutes long, and even if a good half hour seems a little on the short side, Rick Shaffer makes sure to get his intentions heard in just the necessary time, without ever indulging in lengthy guitar antics that would risk robbing the songs of their urgency.  Shaffer must have his roots in a time far before I even listened to music, but contemporary rock fans who fancy the likes of Jon Spencer and Alan Vega will find a lot of redeeming value on this stylishly impeccable retro proto punk garage blues album!

• Pascal Thiel, DisAgreement, Luxembourg, March 2010