Broken Souls is the tenth full-length album by guitarist, singer, songwriter Rick Shaffer. The project is a 70’s Proto-Garage Rock straight up Blues Stomp that is Shaffer’s most direct album to date where he walks a tightrope of emotional credibility. A five-decade self-reflective career with Shaffer never resting, while he keeps pushing and coming to terms with bad choices, personal and musical history, and his own mortality. Recorded partly in Holly Springs, Mississippi and Detroit, Michigan, the album is a highly addictive primitive ferocity, where highly distorted tones are delivered straight with no chaser.
The classic opener, Love Light, contains a Motown styled back beat in a 60’s soul crawl that will kick you into locomotion, with guitar work providing plenty of mojo to become a full-out proto garage rock burner. Pale Highway provides a one-two upper-cut in a retro mid-sixties of Yardbirds / Pretty Things style R&B.
Just Ain’t Me and Same All Over are a pure rock & roll rush propelled by the rock-solid Detroit rhythm section of Teddy Rixon and Stevie Carlisle with a metallic guitar crush and banshee vocal by Shaffer. These two tracks contain incredible riffs and solos, delivered with force, swagger and pile-driving garage rock that’s synonymous with Detroit.
Station Man was written for a very close friend of Shaffer’s who found his own path to oblivion, and it gives the listener some Hill Country muscle in a thick swampy hip-shaking beat, ragged edged slide, with vocal and lyrical content of fire and urgency. The rhythm sections of Leon Wingfield and Les Chisholm on the Holly Springs tracks provide a small juke-joint combo feel tearing-up and showcasing some greasy Hill Country blues exemplified on the tracks Station Man, Mr. Boston and Win or Lose. Shaffer sounds his most relaxed with this raw electrified blues that positively burns.
Two of the more atmospheric tracks, Desire Street and Closing Time, are dark in color and texture with lean meaty guitar lines and a sound like a marriage of Iggy Pop and the Stones at their most sublime crunching hard rock.
Like Fire is a late night classic full of haunting emotion that’s a poignant overdose tale that harkens back to the psychedelic undertow of Jim Morrison and The Doors. The song contains some guitar work stylings like the work Shaffer did with The Reds on the Band of the Hand soundtrack. His guitar work has mysterious, taut and razor sharp phrasing and, not to be ignored, his vocal is a dark soulful rasp with an undiminished singers’ poetic passion.
Each element of this album projects something from the past — hill country grooves, distorted guitars of the early 70’s Stones, multi-textured, deeply melodic songs, with rough-howling vocals filtered through a modern prism. Rick Shaffer continues to push his sound forward making relevant albums, while musicians half his age are washed-up and creatively exhausted. Mostly, I think, Shaffer likes providing us with loud, raucous crunching sounds to keep the dance floor filled.
Broken Souls with its live-wire intensity reaffirms the power of rock and roll that makes for such an infectious listen.
∎ Eddie Shelton, Tarock Music, July 7, 2020
