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SOLEDAD BROTHERS - The Onion

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

SOLEDAD BROTHERS - Washington Post

Friday, March 31, 2006; WE10

SOLEDAD BROTHERS"The Hardest Walk"Alive

ORIGINALLY a Detroit neo-blues twosome that was inevitably compared with the White Stripes, the Soledad Brothers have expanded significantly, and not just in personnel. The band's new album, "The Hardest Walk," features four players -- only three officially Soledad sibs -- and a style that employs the blues as a foundation rather than as a straitjacket.

The album opens with a brace of bluesy rockers, "Truth or Consequences" and "Downtown Paranoia Blues," but these days that's not all the Brothers can do. Thanks in large part to singer-guitarist Johnny Walker's soulful delivery, the Soledads are just as convincing when they stroll as when they chug, and such psychedelic numbers as "Loup Garou" and the sitar-meets-pedal-steel "True to Zou Zou" show that, despite a major debt to Jagger-Richards, the brothers have also paid attention to Brian Jones's contribution to the late-'60s Stones. (The brief "White Jazz" suggests that the band has even been listening to Albert Ayler, or at least the first MC5 album.) Such eclecticism isn't enough to reinvent the blues-rock genre, but at its best "The Hardest Walk" does reanimate it.

-- Mark Jenkins