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Review: Blues Pills, Bierkeller
Blues Pills are well into Black Smoke, the final song of their main set, and the boisterous audience is slam-dancing away when someone slips over the barrier and makes a bee-line for Elin Larsson. A bouncer hurtles after him, but the slender singer is sent flying into the drum kit. The music stops and she lies on the floor for a few seconds looking slightly dazed while the buffoon is manhandled away. Will they abandon the gig? Nobody seems quite sure what to do until Larsson gets up, dusts herself down, and grins, “Shall we take it from the chorus?”
These absurdly young, multi-national (two Swedes, a Frenchman and an American) blues rockers seem to have been on the road more-or-less continuously for more than a year now, so are presumably used to taking such incidents in their stride. You won’t read about them in the mainstream press, despite their potentially massive crossover appeal, but Blues Pills seem to be having no trouble finding their audience. Just five months on from packing out the Fleece, they step up to the Bierkeller, pulling a sizeable crowd despite the competition from UFO just up the road at the Academy (shouldn’t there be some kind of central clearing house to prevent these annoying clashes happening?).
is needed now More than ever
This being the last date of the current leg of the never-ending tour, they’re ferociously well-drilled. Extraordinarily gifted Robby Krieger lookalike guitarist Dorian Sorriaux – who was, astonishingly, just 16 years old when he joined the band – seems lost in his own private reverie as he takes the opportunity to stretch and bend those concise songs into extended but never self-indulgent jams. Unleashed onto a larger stage, Larsson is a constant whirl of hair-tossing, head-banging, tambourine-wielding motion, none of which impairs her powerful vocals, for which the term Joplin-esque might have been coined. The plaintive slow blues of No Hope Left For Me could easily charm the Jools Holland pipe’n’slippers MOR audience if given the opportunity to do so, while Larsson’s solo intro to Devil Man is a genuine hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment.
But the downside to honing their craft so impressively on the live circuit is that Blues Pills play exactly the same set as they did at the Fleece, right down to the cover of Tony Joe White’s Elements and Things. Sure, the order has been jigged about a bit, but they’ve got just the one full album to draw on. Time to get back to the studio and come up with some new material.
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