Black Joe Lewis trawls the intersection of blues, soul, funk, and garage rock—a well-traveled juncture. But he has a few strategies to make this timeworn mixture more tangy on his new album, Backlash. The first is vocal: Lewis can unleash a stirring scream, a cauterizing billow of noise that’s sure to flutter your nervous system. The second is compositional: he likes shifting dynamics so that a slack song suddenly stiffens and lashes out, like a horse kicking an inconsiderate handler.
That scream, coupled with his heavy reliance on guitars, has earned Lewis comparisons to blues institutions (Muddy Waters), soul shouters (Wilson Pickett), and funk innovators (James Brown). But he prefers a different descriptor. “It’s all about putting on a good show and getting everyone having a good time,” he said in 2013. “There’s no category for that other than rock’n’ roll, as far as I know.”
Lewis has shed collaborators and labels since releasing his full length debut, Tell ’Em What Your Name Is!, in 2009. After a pair of albums produced by Spoon’s Jim Eno on Lost High Way records, he jumped to Vagrant and worked with an almost entirely different band for 2013’s Electric Slave, while Stuart Sikes and John Congleton split duty behinds the boards. He’s back with a similar crew this time—Sikes produced the whole thing—on InGrooves. It’s been nearly three and a half years since the last record: his longest break as a recording artist, and maybe a sign that records don’t matter much if your stage show is an effective good-times machine.
In truth, the changes between the second and third album didn’t much alter the music coming out of your speakers, and the same rules apply to Backlash, where the foundation is still a selection of forms at most two degrees removed from the blues. When Lewis adds cement to the beat and irrigates his guitar with fuzz, there’s an outline of the Sonics, or maybe the Black Keys. Snappy rhythms and bright, highly enunciated guitar leads put Lewis in the neighborhood of the New York soul revival labels Daptone and Truth & Soul. There’s an “uh-ah” chant that might trace back to Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” and female backing vocals that hint at the Sweet Inspirations.
You know this material well, and that’s where Lewis’ stand-at-attention strategies come in. He tends to ratchet up the energy just as his songs are ending, like a driver who speeds up to red lights. On “Global,” he hits you with the first howl just to straighten your spine in the song’s final minute, then wallops you with three of these in a row and adds another one low and far back in the mix for good measure. A comparable moment occurs during the bridge of “Freakin’ Out,” where the guitar quivers with enough agitation to merit a song of its own.
On “Prison,” Lewis generously gives you a 40-second lump of the really rowdy stuff. After a solo, he realigns with his band, and together they clobber their way out of the song with scabrous, cutthroat riffs and a dollop of defiance from Lewis: “I don’t mind being locked up!” But seconds later, the track comes to a close. It’s thrilling and enervating at the same time—Lewis gives the briefest glimpse of a supremely raucous affair, then shunts you out of a side door, all dressed up with nowhere to go.
