Album Review: Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown - Pressure

We're deep enough into the Coronavirus pandemic that we are finding ourselves facing what we call 'quarantine albums' with regularity now. It was inevitable that artists were going to find themselves making new music once the world shut down, and they didn't have the option of being out on tour. I suppose this does lead us to questions about how bands were able to tour back in the old days and still record new albums every year, if not even faster. Yes, I know the financial environment changed, but anecdotally there seems to be more division between touring and creating, with far less writing being completed on the road. That's what interests me as a question, although it is not the subject for right now.

Tyler Bryant found himself writing new songs during the time off, and that led him to the creation of this record, sooner than a new album would have been expected. The reality of the world led him to new songs, and those songs fell into place as a record. It was written in a pandemic, and recorded more raw and organic than normal. The album art is supposed to reflect this, with the needle pressed into the red, but I find that rather worrying. A recording of such would be a terrible thing to listen to (I'm looking at you, Baroness).

That worry is there when the first sounds we hear are Bryant's distorted vocals indeed sounding like a red-lined recording, which then segues into guitars that are also just fuzzy enough to give the same aesthetic. I'm not sure how it came to be that people think fuzz is how to make guitars sound heavy. The opposite has always been true to me, with fuzz taking away all the percussive force a guitar can muster, which leaves us with only a soft wash of noise. I guess I'm in the minority on that one.

This album is full of short, and to-the-point songs that don't overstay their welcome. That's a good thing when we're talking about songs like "Hitchhiker", which is a simple blues number with a distorted slide guitar driving the action, and very little of a hook. It's the sort of song that makes me ask myself what it is in the composition that made the band decide it was a song they just had to record and put on an album. I'm not hearing the key idea they were so in love with.

Compare that to "Crazy Days", which is a Friday night bar sing-along type of song, with some searing lead guitar, and a big hook. That song's appeal is apparent right from the start, and the charm doesn't wear off. What becomes clear to me as the album unfolds is that the shorter, more aggressive numbers are not as appealing as the songs that have more room to breathe. More laid-back material like "Holdin' My Breath" and "Wildside" are fantastic, with both great melodies and interesting guitar parts. Everything shines through better when there isn't a need to push harder than the band should be going. Their sound isn't that naturally heavy, so trying to be more than they are comes across as effort, and effort ruins songs.

This album comes sooner than the usual album cycle, and I hate to say it, but it sounds like it. We've got a handful of great songs, but there's also the dirty blues that holds no appeal to me whatsoever, and a few ballads that never stir up much emotion. There's a really good EP to be found in here, but "Pressure" succumbs as an entire album.