STONE BLIND VALENTINE: Burn Like A Field
STONE BLIND VALENTINE
Burn Like A Field
Stone Blind Valentine
It takes more than a bit of musical confidence and know-how to meld a proudly contemporary sense of songwriting and lyricism with an instrumental foundation that evokes the echoes of the traditional rural music of the country, but the three members of Chicago-based Stone Blind Valentine carry that trick off nicely on their self-released debut effort Burn Like A Field. Guitarist Gregg Ostrom has a wide variety of influences, among them bluegrass rhythm pioneers like Lester Flatt, Del McCoury and Tony Rice, and he has a good knack for it. Mandolin player Colby Maddox is a veteran of The Special Consensus, a nationally recognized Chicago bluegrass band with nearly four decades of history behind them. Both Ostrom and Maddox contribute background vocals, but the lead vocals of the band’s third member, Emily Hurd, are what really propel the album and the trio’s appeal as a whole.
In addition to writing the dozen songs on the album, Hurd sings with a voice that seems to effortlessly hover between alto and soprano, rich and powerful, yet capable of tenderness and restraint. Though she contributes touches of banjo and piano on a couple of tracks, the true power of the music here is the matching of Hurd’s voice to the tight, all-acoustic backup provided by Ostrom and Colby, from driving, up-tempo tunes like the title track to the laid-back, introspective “Crown The Kings.” Hurd writes convincingly of love lost, found, and never was – from the exuberance of “Gold Fever” to the world-weary “Think What You Will” with its offhand observation “you had my number long before you had my name.” And, “Whiskey Neat” is a pretty good stab at the drinkin’ blues genre. Overall, it’s a sound that’s not quite bluegrass, but should have equal appeal to both grass-ophiles and grass-ophobes.
— John Lupton