(Northern Blues Music)

www.northernblues.com

Blues music is thinking man's music, but Watermelon Slim's blues… well, that's rocket-science, genius-level stuff, a cut above your average Grade-A filet in both sound and taste. You would think that it would be tough for Slim to follow up a Blues Music Award winning effort like last year's The Wheel Man, yet here he is again, with his superb houserockin' band The Workers – also Blues Music Award winners – delivering another phenomenal effort in No Paid Holidays.

For the uninitiated, Slim's half-slurred, half-growled vocal patois (equal parts Carolina soul and Okie drawl) takes some getting used to hearing. But throw in Slim's haunting National Steel slide guitarplay, which hangs across these songs like vines dripping down from the limbs of a Cypress tree, combine it with his shotgun harp work, include a band that knows when to be quiet and when to be loud, and you have a lethal chemistry. Slim's whipsmart lyricism is backed up by real-life bumps-and-bruises… all a beautiful shade of blues… and enough skilled wordplay to entertain listeners for hours.

No Paid Holidays follows Slim's tried-and-true formula – a couple of gutbucket blues romps ("Gearzy's Boogie," "Blues For Howard"), a romantic tearjerker ("You're The One I Need" ), a mournful field holler with sparse instrumentation ("This Traveling Life"), and a couple of greasy juke-joint slides (Lee Roy Parnell drops by to add some bottleneck breaks to "Bubba's Blues," while "I've Got A Toothache" is just downright scary). Slim displays his storytelling skills with the entertaining "Max The Baseball Clown," while "Archetypal Blues No. 2" covers a lot of historical ground with name checks of giants like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and John Lee Hooker delivered above a raging boogie beat. A cover of Laura Nyro's "And When I Die" is stripped down from its better-known Blood, Sweat & Tears arrangement, reduced to a raw, emotional country-blues stomp.   

The bottom line: the blues just don't get any better than No Paid Holidays — making Watermelon Slim and the Workers a true musical force of nature.

Standout Tracks: "I've Got A Toothache," "Archetypal Blues No. 2"  REV. KEITH A. GORDON