West Country boys The Heavy this time bury their deep and abiding love of Prince records with some equally possessed James Brown impersonations and lashings of monster, garage riffs. Let’s face it, guitarist Dan Taylor and Vocalist Kelvin Swaby are ostensibly music fans first and full-on wacky artists second. But as far as hierarchies go you could do far worse, given the sheer, crunchy belligerence of tracks like, ‘Oh, Not You Again’ – with it’s sexy, call and answer girlie-band chorus (a bit like the Shangri-Las taking a collective rear offensive from Hawkwind’s Lemmy) and the shameless funky retro of ‘Sixteen’ – which has more dust and more spit than Howlin Lord Woolf and more mud than the Mississippi. It’s all a bit of throw-back theatre, perhaps, with production signatures more memorable than the actual tunes, and more nods and winks than an end-of-pier show with a disgraced English comic, but when the boys balance up their sample-heavy homages with some true, original grit of their own – as on the deliciously skank, ‘Cause For Alarm’ and the rocksteady surf of ‘Love Like That’ – something quite special happens.
Mixed and produced by Jim Abiss (Arctic Monkeys, Adele and Kasabian), ‘The House That Dirt Built’ competes more than adequately in the ‘let’s make it sound really old and retro’ fad popularised by the likes of Amy Winehouse and the band’s new chums, The Noisettes, and though it comes perilously close to a Lenny Kravitz-style posturing on occasions, the sheer weight of their affection and risk-taking pulls them through.
Well worth investigation for those are still convinced that Duffy’s ‘Mercy’ is an old Third Degree cover or for those who have misplaced their ‘Life On Mars’ soundtrack.