A decade having passed since her last album, UK British Blues Award winner and four-time European Blues Award nominee Bex Marshall offers a ten track blues tapestry dabbling in life’s addictions, from one too many lovers to liquor drank alone in the dead of night, through to the world changing for the worse and wishing one could have made different decisions in the past. Through it all, Marshall deals with the cards Lady Luck’s dealt her.
Fortuna was recorded with friends on the London music scene and a few New York boys brought in to stir this heady pot of blues, funk, rock, and Americana, the album was engineered, co-produced and mastered by Nick Hunt (Dave Stewart, Boy George, Placebo, George Clinton) who had served similar duties on Marshall’s previous album House of Mercy.
“The album is where I am today musically and philosophically and reflective of the performer I am now,” she said. “I wanted to take the hard lumps out of life, and present them back in a different light, sometimes with humour, sarcasm, or resilience but always with a shed load of tenacity. I wanted to make a record with iconic guitar sounds, heavenly funky keyboards, roots infected vocal lines with the funk in the trunk. The album is the most upbeat offering from me to date and I want to produce a show of high energy blues rock euphoria to reignite people’s mojos.”
To that end, it starts well with ‘Preaching To The Choir’, where its subtle funky rhythmic turnabout feeds soulful lyrics alongside some deeper manta-intoned gospel harmonies from Shola Adegoroye, while busy little guitar lines bringing honey to the pot. Whether Marshall’s accusing an individual or a current social state-of-mind, is left to the listener to decide, but it’s a hip-shaking late-night dance groove nonetheless.
Second number, ‘Dirty Water’, is one of a few here that sounds like it was actually recorded late at night; a perfect setting for the blues. Sultry electric piano leads the way in gently to a number that uses familiar lyrical blues tropes to effective emotional delivery and some charged guitar licks once it picks up the pace. The early hours sober-deliberation blues of ’5am’ follows a little later, where she contemplates the heady night before and the break-up that ensued. Crystal glass clear guitar lines sparkle throughout on this one while a weary-toned voice bridging the soft gap between Maggie Bell and Bonnie Raitt relates the long night’s regrets.
Co-written with Scott Coopwood in Clarksdale, Mississippi, “with revered local musicians”, ‘I Can’t Look You In The Eye’ is a more up tempo see-saw sliding riffed number, that never quite keeps still and thus is rather appropriate for the song’s theme. Even livelier is ‘Jungle’, that may well reference that locale as a seat of madness in the same way old Guns ‘N Roses did, but the visual imagery you’ll have in your head as you listen to this one is of the wild and woolly west, with galloping piano and stream-train slide work before the percussive element kicks in and those line dancers get up off of their feet to shuffle about. Easy going, friendly-faced Americana this one. Ostensibly a blues number, ‘Table For One’ really makes its bed in that singer-songwriter troubadour soft-patch, with many wry self-depreciating womanly lines, “We don’t have to go Dutch” but one.
Title track, ‘Fortuna’, proves to be an instrumental, its Texas blues guitar lines ride out across the prairie then head south, soaking up a lot of Latin flavours while rocking it up, then Marshall’s guitar delivers a cry as the loud and proud 12 bar shuffling ‘Lay Down And Die’ has the lady delivering some more witty lines that sum up her attitude to life, and if you’re in doubt, she’s not prepared to start getting measured for a coffin anytime soon. ‘Scrapyard Dog’ is a lazy Sunday blues croon, where organ, bass and her own guitar each pick out choice notes that put you in the right mood, so much so, you might need to press replay so you can raise a smile at the lyrics, delivered once more in that Bell/Raitt manner she exudes well.
Things pick up pace one last time on the skipping savoir faire nonchalance of ‘When It’s Gone’. With something of an old school pop flavour, should Lulu ever record a country album she’d do well to cover this. Some lovely harmonies on the chorus followed by a lilting guitar refrain, right up the fade-out where the piano joins.
Purely using the ten tracks on Fortuna as evidence, I’d say Bex Marshall currently holds a pretty good set of cards in her hands.
- Review by Paul H Birch.
- Fortuna is released via Dixiefrog Records and is available physically here and digitally here
- Official Website | Facebook | X (Twitter)
Track List:
- Preaching To The Choir
- Dirty Water
- I Can’t Look You In The Eye
- 5am
- Jungle
- Table For One
- Fortuna
- Lay Down And Die
- Scrapyard Dog
- When It’s Gone
