VELVET THUNDER

The Speaker Wars is a band that is the brainchild of Stan Lynch, long-time drummer and founding member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. After two decades of recording and touring multiple albums with The Heartbreakers, Stan had moved to the other side of the recording console and shifted his focus to production and songwriting, over the years writing and producing hits for artists in multiple genres including the Eagles, Don Henley, Tim McGraw, The Mavericks, Ringo Starr, The Byrds, Toto, and The Fabulous Thunderbirds. While writing in Nashville, a publisher introduced Stan to Texas singer-songwriter, Jon Christopher Davis, who was gathering material for a solo record on a major label. After accumulating an album’s worth of songs, Jon abandoned working on a solo record and the two decided to start a band to perform the newly created material. Adding Jay Michael Smith on guitar, Brian Patterson on bass, Steve Ritter on percussion, and Jay Brown on keyboards, The Speaker Wars was born!

The band headed into 5M Studios in Denton, TX, with co-producer Mike Pisterzi, and produced a full-length album. Upon hearing the material, Frontiers Records immediately signed the band and you can now get to hear the fruits of their labours – the debut album The Speaker Wars is out now.

Interestingly, I’ve just reviewed another huge slab of Americana in the form of Don Felder’s The Vault, and this album follows a similar vibe. Very nicely done, mind, and The Speaker Wars has a pleasingly high degree of variety across its ten tracks, although as you’ll see later on this creates issues…. The album opens with You Make Every Lie Come True, and vocalist Jon Christopher Davis instantly stamps his husky yet smooth West Coast drawl on proceedings. It has a guitar line that immediately makes me think of…dozens of bands – TP, The Heartbreakers, John Cougar Mellencamp, The Jayhawks, Bryan Adams – you get the picture, and I like it – a lot! It Ain’t Easy follows, a darker, staccato number that rumbles broodingly along until half-way when a nicely sparky bit of guitar kicks in from Jay Michael Smith. Definitely a hint of mid-to-latter day Eagles with JCD really getting powerfully stuck in as singer. This is certainly good quality stuff.

Taste Of Heaven feels like pure Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in its arrangement, and I suspect it won’t be the last one to do so (I ain’t complaining!) Jay’s minor-chord bluesy riffs strongly echoes the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell in his phrasing. This is modern blues-rock and it works. Never Ready To Go is even more redolent of TP and his band, seemingly quite deliberately so, down to the organ lines, the four-bar blues beat, and a vocal line that had me imagining TP taking over the lead microphone, bless him, what a sad loss him being taken too soon, the track could almost have been written as a eulogy to him – lovely stuff, even if sad….for me, the strongest track on the album.

The Forgiveness Tree takes us deep into Eagles territory, a classic soft country-rock ballad, akin to Don Henley’s Desperado, Bob Seger’s We’ve Got Tonite or Jackson Browne’s Runnin’ On Empty etc. Lovely, lyrical stuff, a simple enough song, hugely melodic, hugely enjoyable. I’m not so sure about the next one – When The Moon Cries Wolf again reminds me of the Eagles, but some of their formulaic, less impressive numbers. Trader’s South is back into country ballad mode, explicitly an “Outlaw saga”, it’s hard to say anything fresh about this style of song, you either like it or not….Leave Him is outwardly another ballad but for me it IS more “fresh”, it might still plough that traditional country furrow but it’s got more imagination, more interest than the earlier track. “One man’s meat” and all that!….

Sit With My Soul again continues that sense of countrified “deep-south story-telling”, with elegant backing vocals that could be Emmylou Harris for instance. A sparse, evocative arrangement that’s pleasant enough. The song-set concludes with I Wish You Peace, a brief, slightly cheesy “I lurv the world” number that ironically ISNT a cover of the Eagles’ track. It’s pleasant without setting my (non-American) pulse beating; and that’s the conundrum for this band. They obviously love their Americana roots and it’s what drives them musically, but there’s been so many truly great bands that precede them – do they “stay safe” and continue to almost be an Eagles/Bob Seger/Byrds/Gram Parsons /Jackson Browne tribute band; or do they get rockier, closer to a Tom Petty style of production? I’d recommend the latter, as borne out by the very good first four numbers here…go for it guys!

Or…