Album Review: Shade by Living Colour

Living Colour is a legendary band at this point, and it is a big loss for anyone who sleeps on or underestimates their latest release Shade. Musical proficiency has always been a hallmark of the popular group, but the songwriting is even stronger than the tricky and stylish guitar licks and bass runs. Golden-throated vocalist Corey Glover, like the late Ronnie James Dio or, say, Jill Janus of heavy metal band Huntress, often sounds like he could roll out of bed and still belt out a perfectly rocking and on point soulful blast to thousands of people.

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For many disenfranchised teens in the late 1980s, particularly those of us who might not have lived in the close proximity to a cool college town or a major American city, rock salvation amidst the litany of bad teen pop and hairspray metal dominating MTV at the time didn.

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Still consisting of guitarist Vernon Reid, singer Corey Glover, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun, Living Colour’s sixth album in 30 years drags the blues away from cosy, recycled clichés that haven’t moved with the times since Albert King’s epoch-making Born Under A Bad Sign. Reid claims the album’s blues impulse was ignited when the band was possessed by Robert Johnson’s spirit when blasting through his Preachin’ Blues at Harlem’s Apollo. They then spent five years recording and honing an album with producer Andre Betts, finally emerging with a seething blast of punk-metal ferocity for urbulent modern times.

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Living Colour are the world’s longest-serving black-rock practitioners next to George Clinton’s Funkadelic. Their sixth album in 30 years and the follow-up to 2009’s The Chair In The Doorway, Shade sees guitarist Vernon Reid, singer Corey Glover, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun giving the blues a much-needed anger-driven 21st-century makeover after claiming to have been possessed by Robert Johnson’s spirit during a transcendental blast through his Preachin’ Blues at Harlem club the Apollo. The band spent five years harnessing their newly inspired blues-metal visions with producer Andre Betts, forging incandescent juggernauts such as Freedom Of Expression (F.

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Veteran art-metal crew Living Colour stretch across time and genre for another serving of righteous rage. But for sixth album Shade, they fold blues music into their singular crunch: Tracks like "Freedom of Expression (F. O.

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