Living Colour album. Photo / Supplied
Rating:
* * *
With their '89 debut
Vivid, Living Colour
were hailed as the first black rock band, the politics of race/media around them was talked up by the Black Rock Coalition, and guitarist Vernon Reid repeatedly noted that 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 lineup changes and they quit in the mid-90s, only to reform at the start of this decade.
This album, their second since then, 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 and the screaming ker-runch of
Out of My Mind
) sound more like a political argument than a band to command your stereo.
Graham Reid
(elsewhere.co.nz)
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