danny kroha detroit blues

​Danny Kroha (from the album Detroit Blues available on Third Man Records) (by Chris Wheatley)
 
Detroit Blues, the new album from veteran singer-songwriter and guitarist Danny Kroha, makes for an intriguing proposition. Danny Kroha has a long and diverse discography, including stints with Blues-Punk outfit, The Gories, and avant-garde Garage Rockers, The Demolition Doll Rods. This is a thoughtful, intelligent musician whose artistic width also covers Gospel, old school Blues, and Folk. Detroit Blues is a home-recording, which utilizes a host of traditional instruments such as wash-tub bass, jug, the one-stringed diddley bow (an early, rudimentary form of guitar), washboard, tambourine and foot-stomps. For the arrangements themselves, Kroha took inspiration from both old-time Blues and country. Says Kroha, ‘I listen to both genres, for sure. I just wasn’t trying to make a record that sounds like that. It just came out more like a field recording than a studio recording’.
 
We get a generous fourteen tracks here, beginning with “Poor Howard,” a rousing Country Blues, which jigs and reels, with Danny Kroha's vocals rising and falling with the beat. ‘Whose been here, since I've been gone, pretty little girl with a red dress on’. It's a curiously affecting song, strongly reminiscent of classic cuts laid down in the early part of the twentieth century. Somewhere between Bill Monroe's Western Swing, Jimmy Rodger's rolling Country, and Charlie Patton's ancient -sounding Blues, Danny Kroha makes a home of his own in the songs. There is no post-modern cynicism here, Kroha clearly has a deep-rooted affection for the period. He also has the musical talent and nous to pull of a heart-felt homage, which is eminently listenable in its own right.
 
The Detroit Blues title track chuffs along with the sharp and spirited delivery of early Dylan. Kroha conjures simple, hypnotic rhythms, singing with moving sincerity. The essential life-affirming, sometimes playful, spirit of Woody Guthrie and Odetta float through this music. ‘When they ride, ride the rod, put their trust, in the hands of god’. Danny Kroha's skill as a lyricist is not to be underrated. Like the best Roots music, he connects on a very human level, with tales of hard lives and hearts' longing. “Way Down in Florida” features some fine resonator slide guitar over thumping, wash-tub bass. Kroha summons flurries of ringing notes which flutter like steel butterflies. On “Come Out the Wilderness”, he slows the pace down to a crawl. Constructed from stomps and rustic guitar, even with such a sparse composition, Danny Kroha manages to convey a sense of complete envelopment, drawing the listener into a bygone/modern world.
 
The stop-start, highly entertaining, “Adam And Eve”, with it kazoo-driven melody, is equal-parts eccentric and comfortingly familiar. This is the secret to the success of Detroit Blues. On every track Kroha successfully employs a fine balance between the old and the new, between rawness and subtlety. A splendid cover of “House of the Rising Sun” (once recorded by the aforementioned Woody Guthrie) sparkles beautifully, cold and clear like a mountain river. Danny Kroha closes with “Up Above My Head”, a proto-rockabilly number on which he lets some of his punk/garage spirit shine through. (by Chris Wheatley)
 
Listen and buy the music of Danny Kroha from AMAZON
 
For more info, check out the Danny Kroha website
 

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