This grand New Orleans collective returns to the fray with an infectious dollop of soulful funky and slippery grooves.
The Deslondes roll back into town with another excellent dollop of slippery grooves on their 4th album “Roll It Out”. Still anchored to their New Orleans roots, the band prove, once again, that as a collective, they have a wealth of talent on board with all of the band members contributing songs and sharing vocal duties.
Having taken a sabbatical after their first two albums (with Sam Doores and Riley Downing releasing their solo albums in the interim) The Deslondes reconvened for “Ways & Means” in 2022. That album expanded on their New Orleans groove with several of the songs adorned by synths and strings while still adhering to the essential roots of the crescent city’s gumbo soul. “Roll It Out” rolls it back a bit, the arrangements stripped back to their bar band essentials, explained in part by the replacement of Cameron Snyder by Howe Pearson who has joined the lineup of Sam Doores, Riley Downing, Dan Cutler and John James Tourville. Pearson shares history with Doores, both having been a member of Hurray For The Riffraff. His presence, according to Doores, was” a little more upbeat, more like what we used to have when we were just a New Orleans dance band. It pepped everything up.”
Suitably pepped up, they open the album with ‘Hold On Liza’, a long-time live favourite, written by Downing who says that they struggled to record it successfully on previous occasions. Here they deliver a grand performance which could easily sit on The Band’s early albums. Doore’s ‘Take Me Back’ follows, it’s a rollicking and rip-roaring song with oodles of squirrelling guitars, an early indication of the band’s versatility as they variously dip and delve into various avenues throughout the album. There’s the delightful ‘Find The Ground’, a delicate pedal steel sweetened number, the soulful groove of ‘Who Really Knows’, a song which finds the band strutting like The Meters, and the bar room jaunt which is ‘Go Out Tonight’. ‘Grand Junction’ harks back to sweeter times, a song you can imagine Glen Campbell singing while ‘Old Plank Road’ skips along quite splendidly as the band reminisce on their early days. ‘I Don’t Want To Go Out Tonight’ revels in the piano tradition of Fats Domino and Professor Longhair.
Capping it all, they end with a cover version of JJ Cale’s ‘Drifter’s Wife’, another song they have performed live over the years. Here, they finally commit it to wax and they do so quite brilliantly. Overall, The Deslondes deliver good-time music with an infectious groove and “Roll It Out” deserves to be heard far and wide.
