With their 89 breakthrough debut Vivid, Living Colour were hailed as the first black rock band, the politics of race/the media around them was talked up by the Black Rock Coalition, and guitarist Vernon Reid repeatedly noted now they were through the door the media (MTV, Rolling Stone etc) would close it. One black rock band was enough, thank you.
He was mostly right.
Living Colour delivered hard rock with funk and hip hop in the mix, bludgeoning riffery and Reid’s guitar playing which owed as much to free jazz players like James Blood Ulmer as it did Jimmy Page.
Most of their music was unfocused, there were line-up changes and they quit in the mid 90s, only to reform at the start of this decade.
This, their second since, doesn’t depart too much from the template of funk’n’free jazz-influenced heavy rock fronted by Corey Glover’s powerful vocals, punched in by Doug Wimbush and Will Calhoun (bass and drums) and given edge by Reid’s dramatic chords and scattergun solos.
Time -- and Mars Volta, TV on the Radio and BLK JKS -- may have prepared the ground for a new audience, but Living Colour (with a few exceptions here like the scouring drive of Behind the Sun, the blues-rock Bless Those, the screaming ker-runch of Out of My Mind) still sound like better political argument than a band to command your stereo.
Added: 23 Nov 09
Video
Post a commentShare this article
Use ShareThis to post this article on Facebook, Digg, Twitter and more or send it to a friend by email
Buy it
> The Chair in the Doorway
(roll over button for pricing/availability)
Related pages
This page has been tagged for these topics, click a topic to see other pages tagged for it:
blk jks |
free jazz |
jimi hendrix |
living colour |
tv on the radio |
vernon reid |
<< New Music from Elsewhere index < Caroline Herring: Golden Apples of the Sun (Ode) | Rickie Lee Jones: Balm in Gilead (Universal) >
Post Comment
We welcome comments on this article, provided they have something to contribute. Please note that all links will be created using the nofollow attribute. This is a spam free zone. HTML is stripped from comments, but BBCode is allowed.