Raging Twilight release their first album, Raging Twilight, on April 16th. It only takes you about 30 seconds of listening to the first track with an electric lead grabbing the attention and the steady drive of the whole band on the song ‘Don’t Want A Lover’ to realize this is not a ‘very first album’ and a bit of research shows why. The band was originally formed two years ago by Jack Law and Dougie Harrison. Law released a solo album in 2012 and had been a member of seventies folk/rock band Greenmantle which played alongside the likes of Billy Connolly and Wishbone Ash and has written the songs for Raging Twilight.
The music has a strong blues-folk flavour to it. The second track ‘Old Glass Jar’ stomps its way through with JC Danti’s harmonica driving it along. ‘Hope Sails The River’ is a cheerful singalong track, ‘Iron Way’ is, unusually, a slow railroad song with murder, harmonica and Western-saloon-bar keyboards adding to its edge as it tells the story of Black Jack Ketchum and the murder of Albert Jennings Fountain. American imagery continues on the piano led ‘Dead Horse Point’ and the blues ‘Dust Bowl Rust Belt Blues’.
I think my favourite track is ‘The Slip’, musically just an acoustic guitar behind a lyric about not wanting to be “the slip between cup and lip”. Law has returned to music after a career in public health, notably as Chief Executive of Alcohol Focus Scotland, and you feel the lost lives described in this song are based on things real. The song ends “I know where this all is going and it’s not my kind of trip/I can see where this is going/Don’t wanna be the slip between cup and lip”.
The style changes a little for ‘Hard Times Bad Times’ with keyboard and backing vocals giving it a tinge of gospel. Appropriately enough it leads into ‘You Can’t Get To Heaven’, a full band song with a chorus to keep the audience singing at the end of a set.
The website doesn’t show any gigs booked yet to tie in with the forthcoming release of the album and I’ve not picked up signs of Raging Twilight playing much outside Scotland, but if your local folk club likes a five-piece band with a blues-folk feel to it, check them out on the video below which links to a demo version of ‘Don’t Want A Lover’.
Mike Wistow
Artists’ website: http://www.jacklawsongs.com
‘Don’t Want A Lover’ – the demo:
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