Blues Ambush

Philly’s Blues Ambush brings the swamp bottom bliss of boogie and blues and lets it ooze out of the speakers. Scraping the senses with an amp rattle seance of sludge n’ singe that sends the listener into a deep trance, the band’s latest for Radical Documents is a calculated killer. It’s a windows down, air out the house, shake out the neighborhood kinda platter. The band doesn’t tiptoe around the mission at hand, tearing into a groove on “JA’s Funeral” that reverberates for 13+ minutes of mind flay and brain pan barnacle scrape. The whole record lives in the solar plexus, rattling around through the mind and marrow of the listener until the soul’s shaken clean and everything seems to quake with a new set of colors.

The rest of the record doesn’t drop the pace, stomping through the leaded leads with an aim to flatten the foundations around them. The Ambush doesn’t mess with hooks or texture, instead wielding riff like a precision swung mace, timing each swing with the pace and pound of a rhythm section that seems to be cheering on the amplifier attack with increasing fervor over each minute of the album. “Do It Now!” races to a maniacal pitch, hammering the speakers with ill intent and “Gripper’s Choice” chews on the ragged ends of the Rallizes repertoire with a wicked glee. The band’s long been a killer on the stage, but this feels like the first time they’ve captured even a fraction of the fury between the spools. Don’t miss.