Young James Long: You Ain’t Know The Man

Young James Long – slide guitarist Kirkland James, drummer Taz Bentley, and singer/guitarist P.W. Long – are engaged in an act of compression, pressing entire, fully formed blues-rock emissions into tight pellets of combustible energy, song-bullets fired into the hearts and brainstems of unsuspecting listeners with lethal accuracy.

Even more than that, there’s an immediacy to the five songs on You Ain’t Know the Man that feels less like an interpretation or tribute and more like the real bluesy grit that Jon Spencer always seems to be deconstructing through art-school-colored glasses.

Not that there’s anything wrong with art-school-colored glasses, mind you, but Young James Long have given us the perfect soundtrack to a fistfight, the kind that ends with enemies laughing together and comparing lost teeth over pints. This is rock ‘n’ roll in its most raw, distilled form. If you need it watered down, you should be drinking elsewhere.

– Lyam White
Young James Long (Southern Records)