With a sound that is raw, expressive, and strange, Lonesome Shack’s music is part hill country blues, part urban folk rock, and owes as much to Alan Wilson’s Canned Heat as it does to Junior Kimbrough.
Formed in Seattle, and currently based in London, the trio is led by Ben Todd, a finger picking guitarist who has spent time living in a shack in the New Mexico desert. Alone in the Gila Wilderness, Ben learned how to play old blues and banjo tunes from vintage and traditional recordings.
Desert Dreams is a singular and poetic album of modern American music written at the tail end of a long, challenging winter in London. The result sounds like rock city meets backwoods boogie, desert blues meets jungle grooves.
Today, Ghettoblaster has the pleasure of premiering the video for “Desert Dreams.” This is what Todd had to say about it:
“’Desert Dreams’ is the title track and the final chapter of the album. With a relaxed lightheartedness it follows a dream sequence in which the city fills up with sand and becomes a desert, then hints at rebuilding the city with the same sand that swallowed it up. The chorus is an adapted quote from Joy Williams’ novel ‘The Quick and the Dead.’ I wanted to work with London artist Holly Birtles on this video because I admire her art and photography; her work often mixes noir with humorous details, creating effects that are ‘a bit mad,’ as she says. She had the idea of a floating head so I built the ‘Head Isolator’ which is also featured in the upcoming video for ‘No Way Back.’ This mental incubator serves as a visual theme for the album, a symbol for the way it was written in a period of focused isolation.
Lonesome Shack’s Desert Dreams is out now on limited edition vinyl, CD, digital and streaming formats via Alive Naturalsound Records.
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