Category: Chris Robinson Brotherhood

The Chris Robinson Brotherhood – Anyway You Love, We Know How You Feel (2016)

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Chris Robinson Brotherhood released its fourth studio album Any Way You Love, We Know How You Feel on July 29, 2016.

There was a noticeable lack of accord when the Black Crowes finally called it a day early last year, after an on-off career that lasted more than a quarter-century. The split was largely due to the deteriorating relationship between the brothers Robinson (singer Chris and guitarist Rich), the siblings publicly admitting that however hard they tried to see the bigger picture, they just couldn’t get on. They weren’t the first pair of siblings to break up a rock’n’roll band, of course, but it’s noticeable how Chris has been keen to emphasise the feelgood vibes of his current project the Chris Robinson Brotherhood.

As the name above the door suggests, their music is full to brimming with convivial warmth, the product of proudly hirsute gents who look like the last vestige of some promised hippie ideal from the early 70s. And while there are rich echoes of Sly Stone, Canned Heat and The Band in the dazzling music they make, there’s very little that’s retro. Rather, in keeping with Robinson’s highly organic, farm-to-table aesthetic, they plunder the past to irrigate a boldly expansive new vision.

Anyway You Love, We Know How You Feel is full of things we’ve become accustomed to over the band’s previous three albums: psychedelic trippiness, carefree country-soul, swampy southern rock rolled out under a baking California sun. Yet it’s also wonderfully loose and instinctive, as liable to meander into a cosmic jam as it is to splash around with psychotropic keyboard licks or slide into the swampy cool of a slide-guitar groove.

This voyaging frontier spirit serves to make the Black Crowes sound reductive by comparison. You can understand why Robinson may have wanted to draw a line under his old band. Especially when you hear something as hands-down gorgeous as Narcissus Soaking Wet, in which he and CRB – guitarist Neal Casal, keyboard player Adam MacDougall, new drummer Tony Leone, bassist George Reiff (who has since left) – cook up some righteous psych-funk worthy of Parliament or 70s prime Stevie Wonder. Or the rolling majesty of California Hymn, which feels like a modern transmutation of The Band, right down to its brief appropriation of the turnaround riff from The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

 

Track listing

  1. Narcissus Soaking Wet – 7:07
  2. Forever As The Moon – 5:01
  3. Ain’t It Hard But Fair – 7:35
  4. Give Us Back Our Eleven Days – 2:49
  5. Some Gardens Green – 6:08
  6. Leave My Guitar Alone – 6:09
  7. Oak Apple Day – 7:28
  8. California Hymn – 4:35

 

Companies, etc.

Credits

Notes
Release Date: July 29, 2016
Recording Location: The Brotherhood Arts Labs, California
Duration: 46:43
Genre: American Trad Rock, Blues rock

Label – Silver Arrow

Chris Robinson Brotherhood – Big Moon Ritual (2012)

Chris Robinson Brotherhood is an American blues rock band formed in 2011 by Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson while The Black Crowes were on hiatus.

CRB

It’s hard not to read the name of Chris Robinson‘s second post-Black Crowes venture as a jab at his brother Rich: the brothers brawled through two incarnations of the Crowes in the ’90s and 2000s, and only now has Chris found his Brotherhood, now that he has once again parted ways with Rich. Of course, the Chris Robinson Brotherhood also strikes up a communal hippie vibe on their 2012 debut Big Moon Ritual, an album they recorded after touring for nearly a year, so it bears all the scars of the road along with a healthy disregard of clock and calendar. It is, as they say, how these things used to be made: bands used to tour forever, then roll themselves into the studio, knock out a session, then head back out on the never-ending road. It also happens to be how the Crowes closed out their career, cutting the exceptional 2009 LP Before the Frost…Until the Freeze live in front of an audience at Levon Helm‘s upstate New York barn, and Robinson picks up that thread here, channeling that loose live spirit within the studio.

Perhaps the Brotherhood is a shade too loose — “Tulsa Yesterday” opens with its sprawling 12 minutes and no song dips below the seven-minute mark — but the time passes smoothly as the music ebbs and flows, never diving into a grimy, gritty murk but rolling across a pretty, hazy sunset. Surely, it’s steeped in the ’70s — so much so there are analog synthesizers straight out of A Clockwork Orange — but there isn’t a self-conscious retro-revival here; the Chris Robinson Brotherhood spends their time doing what comes naturally, and the music flows easily, even alluringly, as they jam with no care of when they began or where they will end.

 

Tracklist

1.  “Tulsa Yesterday”   Robinson, Neal Casal  – 11:54
2.  “Rosalee”  – 9:05
3.  “Star or Stone”  – 9:32
4.  “Tomorrow Blues”  – 7:07
5.  “Reflections on a Broken Mirror”  – 7:37
6.  “Beware, Oh Take Care”   (Robinson, Casal)  – 7:46
7.  “One Hundred Days of Rain”   (Robinson, Casal)  – 7:27

All songs by Chris Robinson, except where noted.

Chris Robinson Brotherhood

Others

  • Thom Monahan – engineer, mixing, production
  • Nicolas Essig – assistant
  • Geoff Neal – assistant
  • Bruno Borges – artwork
  • Alan Forbes – artwork (CRB lettering/label art)

Notes

Released:  June 5, 2012
Recorded:  Sunset Sound, Los Angeles, CA
Genre:  Blues rock
Length: 60:28

Label – Silver Arrow Records