About five years ago, The White Stripes made the blues cool again, by basically wrestling it away from the empty, bombastic, arena posturing of Bon Jovi and their giant ilk.
Well, guess what? Italian guitar 'maestro' (not our words) Matt Filippini and his ludicrously-titled Moonstone Project – basically a bunch of folks from bands you forgot ever existed – have got together to make Time To Make A Stand, an album that comprehensively walks up to The White Stripes, punches them in the mouth, steals the blues back from them and goes "Widdly widdly widdly widdly widdly" all over it. And we'd wager that your Dad would bloody well love it.
You know how your Dad always goes on about how modern music is all bang bang bang, and that you can't even tell if the singers are boys or girls, and that it's all done on computers, and how things were generally so much better in his day? Play him Time To Make A Stand by Moonstone Project and he won't be able to fall back on all these arguments because he'll involuntarily start spazzing around the living room doing the ridiculous air guitar thing that he usually reserves for wedding receptions.
Because Time To Make A Stand by Moonstone Project is, quite frankly, a guitar album. It's so crammed with all varieties of guitar – noodley blues guitar, crunching riffery guitar, widdly heavy metal guitar like you used to see on Saturday afternoon ITV shows about speedboats – that at times you fear Time To Make A Stand will burst open so that all the guitar will gush out of the sides like a lanced boil. In a good way, naturally.
It's hard to even place Time To Make A Stand on the 2006 cultural spectrum – everything just seems so overdone. Songs last for upwards of five minutes, contain two, three, sometimes even four guitar solos and heavily feature the sort of testicle-clamp spandexed vocals that we didn't know people even unironically any more. One Moonstone Project tune – Rose In Hell – lasts for seven minutes and 26 seconds. And roughly seven minutes and 24 seconds of that is a drum solo.
So far so Dad. But somehow, Time To Make A Stand by Moonstone Project inexplicably works. Maybe it's because Kashmir rip-offs like On The Way To Moonstone will never, ever be as finger-chewingly awful as the Kashmir rip-off that Puff Daddy did a few years ago. Maybe it's because the bluesy, Armed Forces Network radio-style Americana of Slave Of Time isn't as bad as the last time it was attempted by some Europeans – Fade In/Out by Oasis.
Maybe it's because, for the most part, Time To Make A Stand by Moonstone Project does faithfully recreate the spirit – if not the soul – of classic bluesy 1970s hard rock. Who knows? But this we know – play Time To Make A Stand by Moonstone Project to Jeremy Clarkson and he'd probably stop talking such wank for 49 minutes and 20 seconds, and that's an opportunity that nobody could resist.
Order Time To Make A Stand by Moonstone Project from Amazon for £10.99
[story by Stuart Heritage]