Album Review: Jo Carley & The Old Dry Skulls - "Voodoo Bones & Vaudeville Blues"

 

About a decade ago when I first moved to London, I used to regularly visit an awesome club night run by the Urban Voodoo Machine called Gypsy Hotel which featured all sorts of weird fringe acts from jazz through rockabilly to scuzzy seasick blues mixed in with fire eaters, burlesque dancers and everything you could really want from a great night out. I was going to introduce this article by saying that Jo Carley and the Old Dry Skulls are exactly the sort of band who I could see playing at the Gypsy Hotel and, indeed, upon further investigation they did indeed play at the Hotel a few times.

Voodoo Bones & Vaudeville Blues brings together a heady mix of skeletal rockabilly, voodoo New Orleans blues and vaudeville attitude to create something pretty damn intoxicating. The opening shriek of Little Limbs of Satan and the Cramps-esque Zombie set the tone nicely. Although the band are London based, they used lockdown as an excuse to beat a retreat to the swamps of East Anglia and believe me, I think a bit of that old swamp air has snuck into these recordings with the sinister blues of She Got Him (With Her Voodoo), the ominous Crowhurst's Lament and the lurching slow-fast Dead But He Won't Lay Down definitely conjuring up the images of voodoo smoke rising over the Bayou while elsewhere the psychobilly influenced Under Your Spell.

The only slight complaint about this album is that it does get a bit samey by the time the later tracks come around but the group's sound is different enough from the norm that it prevents this becoming too much of an issue. Overall, if a bit of black magic-fuelled escapism with nods to the Cramps and Screamin' Jay Hawkins floats your boat then you could do a lot worse than giving this album a spin.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

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