Kevin Bronson on December 8th, 2008

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‣ Nice to read that Annie Hardy is at work on new Giant Drag music. Been too long.

‣ I’m late posting this, but Thursday’s L.A. debut of the new Ben Harper-fronted band, Relentless 7, was quite a tour de force — a packed, sweaty hour-plus of big, triumphant rock. Relentless 7 has finished recording its debut album; titled “White Lies for Dark Times,” it’s tentatively slotted for a release in May. I was DJing the Spaceland show, but Jeff Miller, the music writer and L.A. editor of Thrillist.com, has some familiarity with the parties involved and was nice enough to send me this report:

By Jeff Miller

Full disclosure: three of the four members of the new band Relentless 7 have played at barbecues in my backyard, but I won’t let that make this review seem overkind: the fourth member’s really the one people are most interested in. That’s because it’s Ben Harper — slide-man extraordinaire, the proginator of the lazy surf-rock movement (see: Jack Johnson, G-Love, etc), and a mainstay of the mainstages at Bonnaroo, Coachella, and just about every other festival in the country.

His new band — composed of those other three guys, drummer Jordan Richardson and bassist Jesse Ingalls (both formerly of L.A.’s fantastic art-glam band Oliver Future) and their longtime friend, guitarist Jason Mozersky — met Harper after Mozersky slipped him a demo; they’ve been working together, occasionally and quietly, for years, but Thursday’s show at Spaceland was their local coming-out party: 80 minutes of almost non-stop rock, a far cry from some of Harper’s other, quieter projects.

Some new songs like the opener, “Number,” were soupy and southern,”  another, “Fly One Time,” reminiscent of early U2, with a four-on-the-floor beat and a roaring, uplifting chorus. But the band most borrowed from is, unsurprisingly, Led Zeppelin: Harper played a set of their material with John Paul Jones and ?uestlove at Bonnaroo, and his backing band used to occasionally play cover-band shows in Pudge Zeppelin, so it makes sense that Mozersky’s Jimmy Page-ish riffage, Harpers wah-wah jones, and Ingalls always-moving basslines often owed a huge debt to that classic band.

It’s Richardson, though, who really shines: One of LA’s best drummers, he kept this still-getting-their-feet-wet band as super-tight as possible, especially on older Harper tunes like “Better Way” (here turned into a chunky, almost grungy roar) and the night’s one cover, an encore of”  “Under Pressure” — a nod to yet another unlikely supergroup collaboration, with a major difference: David Bowie wasn’t responsible for Freddie Mercury’s graduation from the world of backyard barbecues.