How do you make a blues record without making a blues record? For Vernon Reid and his band, Living Colour, this question fueled the recording of 'Shade,' their first album in eight years.
ZACK WHITFORD
How do you make a blues record without making a blues record? For Vernon Reid and his band, Living Colour, this question fueled the recording of Shade [Megaforce], their first album in eight years. During that time, the veteran genre-bending group struggled mightily to find a cohesive musical thread they could all agree on. But nothing took hold until they performed Robert Johnson’s “Preachin’ Blues” at a benefit concert honoring the legendary bluesman at New York’s Apollo Theater in 2012. While on stage that night, Reid saw the direction for band’s next album laid out before him.
“We went through a lot of different things trying to make a record,” he explains. “The biggest issue was that, whatever we did, it had to have meaning. When we played ‘Preachin’ Blues,’ it had a spark. We were playing the blues, but we did it our way. So I knew we could make a record in which the blues would be a conceptual thread, and there was something about connecting metal and hard rock back to the blues that excited us.”
Living Colour never got by on subtlety, and Shade is every bit as forceful as its early work. And yet, the spirit of the blues had a dramatic effect on the band’s metallic crunch. The grooves are wider and less impatient, and everything feels more soulful and less strenuous. The group’s fiery originals are dotted with rousing covers of Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” and the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Who Shot Ya,” along with a reverent version of the