Kevin Bronson on February 20th, 2012

3

“Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel,” Jimi Hendrix said once of That Which Should Not Be Undertaken Lightly. And don’t the guys in the Record Company know it. The new Los Angeles trio came together about a year and a half ago when singer-songwriter Chris Vos moved to L.A. from Milwaukee and befriended Alex Wood and Marc Cazorla. The latter two had played in the Frequency, art-rockers whose music fell into the electro-psychedelic-shoegaze realm. Inspired one night by listening to “Hooker n’ Heat” (an album John Lee Hooker made with Canned Heat), the friends started jamming and something clicked. “Blues is what we’ve probably all wanted to do our whole lives,” Wood says, “but never had the balls.” The trio’s forthcoming album “Super Dead” does. Anchored by Vos’ true-blues wail, the Record Company’s take on the timeless genre is unvarnished and affecting. It’s as if somebody turned up the humidity.

||| Stream: “Don’t Let Me Get Lonely”