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Track Listings
| 1. Oh No Not You Again |
| 2. How You Like Me Now |
| 3. Sixteen |
| 4. Short Change Hero |
| 5. No Time |
| 6. Long Way From Home |
| 7. Cause For Alarm |
| 8. Love Like That |
| 9. What You Want Me To Do |
| 10. Stuck |
| 11. Stuck |
Product Description
Review
The title of The Heavy’s first album, 2007’s Great Vengeance and Furious Fire, was the perfect trailer. Lifting Samuel L Jackson’s biblical quote from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction set their stall out perfectly; just like the director’s films, their music picked seeds from the past and ground them into a modern cut ’n’ paste cult classic, part Curtis Mayfield, part Isaac Hayes, part Led Zeppelin, all heart and soul.
The House That Dirt Built nicely builds the plot, opening up whole new musical storylines to explore. By the fifth track they’ve already gone through soul, garage punk, voodoo swamp revue, a bit of James Brown funk, Hendrix and balls-out rock; by album’s end they’ve also kicked rockabilly, reggae and even a closing ballad into the gumbo pot. The most surprising thing, however, is how good they are at making it all sound like the work of just one band.
Holding the centre is Kelvin Swaby’s sweet soul voice, whether it’s his Mayfield falsetto or a more muscular Otis Redding bellow, with just a hint of Cee-Lo’s Gnarls Barkley goofiness. That’s not to say this is pastiche: The House That Dirt Built is a serious business.
The monstrous Peter Gun-meets-The Stooges riff of Oh No! Not You Again! is the kind of garage rock that only gatecrashers play at parties: even the backing vocals from Noisettes’ Shingai Shoniwa sound like a one-woman 60s street gang. How You Like Me Now?, with its James Brown hook, is what the JBs might have sounded like if they’d recorded for Stax; Sixteen moves into Screaming Jay Hawkins/Dr John territory… and so it goes on. About the only time their magpie eyes miss the prize is with the white reggae of Cause for Alarm, but as it’s followed by the dancehall grind of Loved Like That, it’s just about forgivable.
Imagine if you could be in all your favourite bands at once. The Heavy already are. --Andy Fyfe
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stylish, soulful and dirty,
By Louise the book worm (Kent, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The House That Dirt Built (Audio CD)
I heard one track of theirs on one of Mark Lamarr's ever-excellent Radio 2 shows, and went straight out and bought the CD the next day. Everything about their unusual brand of bone-rattling, darkly thumping driving soulful rock, speaks to the fan in me of 60s and 70s deep soul and crazy 60s garage, Audioslave, Living Colour, motorcycle gangs in the mould of "The Wild One", and so on and on. There's so much going on in there that I can't, as it were, look away for a moment. The best tracks stand playing over and over again and have their own unique flavours. These are "Oh no not you again!", "Sixteen" and "How you like me now?" by a mile.
The only thing that lets the album down is, in a way, also its strength - that schizophrenic indecision about who they are. When a band really comes together its because their influences are streaming nicely and consistently into the music they've decided to play; underpinning it, but not sat bulkily on the surface. There's a countryish track in there, and a dub track, and neither really work: the sources are too obvious - that pot of ingredients hasn't boiled away nearly long enough. But those three great tracks are so brazenly brilliant, such complete representations of what The Heavy are about, that I forgive them the odd wasted filler track and the underwhelming closing song. Definitely, one to watch. Nice backing vocals from the Noisettes' lead singer, too.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
how can there be only 3 reviews?,
This review is from: The House That Dirt Built (Audio CD)
how do you like me now is a fantastic song.....worth the album cost on its own
now appearing in several movie soundtracks also (The Fighter) cool...
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heavy on the Ears, but in a Good Way!,
By
This review is from: The House That Dirt Built (Audio CD)
Some of you will of course have heard of The Heavy way before now, but for some reason they managed to skip below my radar, cos if I'd heard them before I wouldn't have hesitated to buy right then and there! In this case, I heard 'Big Bad Wolf' on the BBC series Luther, and although that particular song isn't featured on this album, it at least introduced me to their sound and got me hunting. Eventually resulting in me buying both this and their first album Great Vengeance and Furious Fire' - which is equally as good.
For anyone who likes The Black Keys or similar, this is broadly speaking the same kind of thing, but with their own style, and a style that I like. By all means try out a few of their songs (particularly Big Bad Wolf!) before hand, but I'm hoping it does the same for you as me!
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