Next, Walking Papers will join their Seattle pals Alice in Chains on the upcoming Uproar tour. "I got into the studio where the beds of these songs were being tracked and it was just fucking gorgeous.' " and Barrett Martin, who of course I've known since the Nineties, started recording tracks that were the bed of this record," he says. McKagan knew early on that the band was onto something special. "I'll Stick Around," which premieres here on and featuring a guest spot from Pearl Jam's Mike McCready, boasts a slow, grinding blues pace that combines elements of Morphine and Tom Waits. Their dark, alternately sensual and sinister self-titled debut album is out August 6th. Walking Papers is a Seattle quartet that features McKagan, Angell, drummer Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees) and keyboardist Benjamin Anderson. Jane's Addiction Play First Full Show With Duff McKagan "I've had a relationship with him and wanted to work with him for that long." Early on, when we were looking for singers for Velvet Revolver, I brought Jeff Angell down, about 2003," McKagan tells Rolling Stone of the Missionary Position vocalist. "I hoped at some point I would do something with Jeff we're good bros and we share a similar path in certain aspects. Now in his new band, Walking Papers, McKagan gets to work with a vocalist he's long admired, Jeff Angell. On “The Light Below” they’ve done just that.Having played bass with Guns N' Roses, Velvet Revolver and Jane's Addiction, Duff McKagan has been around a lot of talented frontmen. The desire to make something truly brave, truly original, and utterly compelling. “She wants a change of scenery” offers Angell, and that seems to drive this. There’s the instrumental “The Other Shoe”, the slow building “My Thoughts Are Not My Own”, and the fragile, piano led “California (One More Phone Call)” which is the most conventional song here, if you like, a pretty conventional ballad, it is nonetheless, brilliant. The last three could be seen as medley, after a fashion. Strutting, not a million miles from Royal Blood, while there’s something of the shadowy, dank Victorian cobbled streets about “Where Did I Go Wrong?” – or a rather less verbose comparison might be Nick Cave…. “Rich Man’s War” changes the vibe totally. And if nine years of following this band has taught me to expect the unexpected, then I still was taken aback by the drum and bass flavours of “Money Isn’t Everything”. His keyboard work is incredible, as is Gregor Lothian’s sax solo.Įven on an album as broad in scope as this one is, then, “Creation, Reproduction And Death” all nine and a half minutes of it, feels like the centrepiece. Dan Spalding had some mighty bass boots to fill, clearly, but his work on the wonderful “Stood Up At The Gates Of Heaven” propels that one along, while the ecclesiastical theme seems to continue with the hymn-like “Going Nowhere” – and indeed, we must praise Benjamin Anderson for his essentially MVP display throughout. The primal wail of “Divine Intervention”, with its low-slung lick clocks in at over eight minutes, but like the rest, it is astonishingly compelling. Make no mistake, though, these are catchy songs, with choruses to die for. And his lyrics, sound like poetic musings. “The Value Of Zero” is best described as “darkly blues”, and its line of “trust no one, question everything” seems to frame the record as a whole. What “The Light Below” has is actually hard to pin down, beyond that it is a huge, sprawling thing (the 12 songs are well over an hour), ambition, which Walking Papers manage to pull off entirely on their own terms. The real value, surely, is in what they don’t do.Įveryone knows the history, right? Barrett Martin and Duff McKagan were in the band (rule one of journalism is you never assume knowledge, but if you don’t know them, then you aren’t worthy of my explanation), but this version of the band has neither. But they are, very much a rock n roll band. Because, Jeff Angell and his boys are a rock n roll band like no other. All joking aside, it’s the type of nonsense that makes my blood boil.Īnd yet, Walking Papers. It sounds like something that a pretentious arsehole would say (I am only one of those things to be fair) when discussing opera or something: “the real value is in what they don’t play”.
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