Recipient of the Best Musician Performance at the 2018 European Blues Awards, and Best Female Album at the 2019 LA Critics’ Awards, my expectations regarding Susan Santos are only that it’s likely to be blues based and her accent Hispanic. However, few tracks rely on a 12 bar methodology, and while there’s a hint of the cosmopolitan European vocally about her singing it’s hardly profound.
Rather the collection of songs found on Sonora tend to shuffle south of the Mason-Dixon line, over in that continent formerly owned by His Majesty’s forbears, fusing a little rockabilly, the blues, and the traditional into a time frame that flicks between the late 50s and the present in a road movie that pulls alongside the work of Los Bros Hernandez (of Love & Rockets graphic novel fame), then questions if it should take a Thelma & Louise spin on Netflix hit Money Heist, but instead opts for a fast speed getaway and a refusal to have one’s heartbroken too much along the way.
Recorded at Black Betty Studios in Madrid, Spain, where Santos lives. She produced Sonora (alongside Jose Nortes) composed the songs, sang, played electric, baritone, and acoustic guitars, banjo, and theremin. While, one David Salvador is on bass and a Juli El Lentoon on drums. It’s a fulsome sound, no major overdubs but far from a sparce sounding recording.
A self-taught left-handed guitarist, this is something that you begin to appreciate as you take in the rhythms and textures of sound present as the record reverberates on replay. They have a different nuance, a little less predictable in the way a chord will hang or shift, and so aurally it begins to catch your attention. Of course, being caggy-handed myself, I would tend to favour this devilish chosen path.
Her sixth album, Santos offers songs about “survival, thirst, outlaws, escape, and freedom against a backdrop of scorpions, lizards, and roadrunners” among other things.
Shaking the tree initially, we get rock ‘n roller ‘Hot Rod Lady’ – Opening with a fidgety guitar shuffle that sounds like the car she’s in could splutter out and die in the desert any minute, but keeps moving regardless. “I’m so thirsty I could lose my mind,” she sings as big country & western riffs throw you for a spin when they’re followed by a psych-wild guitar solo that makes you wonder if you’ve just wandered through time back onto the set of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo movie, only for that main rock ‘n roll stuttering and chugging guitar to return alongside her repeating the song’s title through to fade-out.
Moving at a slower pace, as if the Buick’s broke down, and you’re now traipsing through that desert heat, we get ‘Snakebite’ the first of a few numbers that bow their hat in the general direction of Tom Waits, this one having a semi-New Orleans jazzy blues feel. I presume Santos is playing baritone guitar on this one with added slide, the overall sound being not too dissimilar to a saxophone. “On ‘Snakebite’, I wanted to achieve the darkest and most swampy point of the album,” Santo said. “It’s a poisoned love story narrated as if it were a duel to the death and at gunpoint in the Wild West. Me, if I may be permitted to carry my desert metaphor a while longer, Santos as protagonist is damned determined she’s not staying out here to get bitten by snakes, real or of the two-legged male variety.
A tale of bad luck and trouble, but with some good-willed humour, ‘So Long’ is a big-hooked slice of hard-loving rock with a touch of country tucked in neatly on the sides. Here, melodious uplifting power chords set a course for a contemplative life changing number imbued with vocal that comes across as a less-world weary Bonnie Raitt hanging out with a solo Stevie Nicks; both “still wearing the same old jeans”. On the other side of the coin, ‘Have Mercy’ is an old style rambling country ballad of the kind you wouldn’t have been surprised to find mimed on some classic Hollywood movie, save there’s an entertaining guitar dancing loudly throughout, alongside some Andrews Sisters go gang-style vocals.
You want some more rock? Then check out ‘What I Want’ that takes that big-mugging guitar and those contrasting sweet harmony vocals on ‘Have Mercy’ but raise hell with them, her left-hand strumming causing a right royal racquet. Then, all of a sudden, it slows down, Beatles-like a little for but a bar or two instrumentally as the guitar strikes a pose; then another joins and they jam out, battling or pivoting towards harmony, differing sounds and styles, until it rocks back into the main number.
‘Voodoo Wheels’ echoes ‘Hot Rod Lady’ in its initial remit. Again, it sounds like a baritone guitar’s busy at work here in a heavy waltzing rockabilly shrugging 50s styled singalong. ‘Call Me Tonight’ strikes an attitude like a coy female-fronted Cheap Trick as it pours on the sugar and pops out the power chords. A little chintzy but there’s something incredibly appealing about it. There’s a freefalling Hendrix tug and tussle to final number ‘Let It Ride’, blues rock with a driving spacy-funk drive, and some deadly guitar fire unleashed within its path you think, save about halfway through it suddenly falls into this deep stoner rock by-way-of Blue Cheer in a 12 bar blues with a psychedelic wailing guitar turnaround ending in a haze of feedback. This is not what you would have expected having heard the previous tracks.
Ultimately, Sonora may play out in various styles and moods and impress you in so doing along the way, but what it’s really about is songs, as Susan Santos chooses assorted musical styles to emphasis or give aural subtexts to the stories she’s singing about.
- Review by Paul H Birch.
- Sonora is available now from here
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Track List:
- Hot Rod Lady
- Snakebite
- So Long
- Have Mercy
- What I Want
- Voodoo Wheels
- Call Me Tonight
- Let It Ride
