Detroit's Soledad Brothers started life as one of those bluesy guitar-and-drum duos that seem to spring up like weeds in local garage-rock scenes, and though they've since added another guitarist and the occasional guest player, Soledad Brothers still cling to the raw, rootsy sound that stripped-down duos do best. The band's new album, The Hardest Walk, traffics in swamp-bound sounds in an urban setting, as on "Downtown Paranoia Blues," which is all tin-shack choodle and uncontrollable jealousy, set in the dank atmosphere of a coldwater flat. Even "Sweet And Easy," the Soledads' stab at a sultry midtempo R&B moaner, doesn't sound too far removed from their cello-aided, dissonant creep-out "Let Me Down," and when they launch into the surging, poppy freak-beat exercise "Good Feeling," lo-fi rust keeps the song from sounding fully positive. The Hardest Walk's key song may be the minute-long avant-noise fragment "White Jazz," which acknowledges the differences between Soledad Brothers and the musical primitivists they borrow from. The Soledads grapple with self-consciousness, and overcome it whenever they slip music past their own heads and into their bones. - The Onion
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