AUTOMATIC CITY - BONGOES & TREMOLOES (LP)

After their first album of raw blues, One Batch of Blues, Automatic City is taking a bold step towards bongo percussion, voodoo, and Caribbean rhythms, blues leaping with spacey echoes, tremolo, and slide guitar vibrations, while maintaining a gritty, raspy sound. That's one of their trademark ingredients, as is their use of instruments more typical of the blues genre, such as the sanza, miscellaneous percussion, and some primitive electronic instruments like the stylophone, theremin, and rhythmic drum machine. Captured live in a session that lasted just a couple of days, the same quartet—led by Eric Duperray on vocals, Emmanuel Mercier on guitar and production, with Raphael Vallade on double bass and Zaza Desiderio on percussion—is crafting its own versions of gems from the songbooks of Willie Dixon, Billy Boy Arnold, and Billy Emerson, as well as Chuck Berry's "Havana Moon," a hypnotic take on R.L. Burnside's "Going Down South," and some original tracks. As initially stated, a bold step forward in the career of this unique blues ensemble.