Cleaning up your act doesn't always have to be a forever thing. In 2019, after the latest edition of his band
Night Beats unexpectedly fell apart, Danny Lee Blackwell decided to try something different -- he went into the studio with
Dan Auerbach of
the Black Keys serving as producer and a band of veteran Nashville session cats backing him up. The result was the album
Myth of a Man, which buffed most of the rough edges off his sound, and eased back on his blues, psychedelic, and garage rock influences and favored a more mature and contemplative, country-influenced tone.
Myth of a Man was by no means a bad or uninspired album, but if anyone wondered if Blackwell's heart was really in it, 2021's
Outlaw R&B suggests that he's learned whatever lessons he wanted from the experience and has tossed the rest aside.
Outlaw R&B is a more disciplined and tightly focused set than 2013's Sonic Bloom or 2016's
Who Sold My Generation, but if Blackwell is better at coloring within the lines on these sessions, he's brought back a lot of the colors he left off his palette on his previous LP. The production on
Outlaw R&B has just the right amount of grain around the edges of the sound, and Blackwell's guitar work has much of its edge back. The songs also load up on the unfiltered blues and psychedelic influences he tamped down on
Myth of a Man -- this is a bit less garage-centric than
Night Beats' earliest work, but this party is wild enough to qualify as a return to form, and the swampy, mildly sinister undertow on tracks like "Shadow," "Crypt," and "Never Look Back" attest to the notion that evil and fun are not mutually exclusive. And while "Hell in Texas" reveals Blackwell hasn't given up on his country inclinations, he's filled it with enough gothic gingerbread to make it seem suitably eccentric.
Outlaw R&B suggests Danny Lee Blackwell hasn't completely turned his back on the
Myth of a Man experiment, but he knows the right amount of dirt can give music some valuable texture, and this music is all the more enjoyable for its increase in grit. ~ Mark Deming