Royal Southern Brotherhood: Heartsoulblood

Blues rock supergroup’s second album.

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Devon Allman and Cyril Neville’s collaboration with the impressively CV’ed likes of guitarist Mike Zito and drummer Yonrico Scott has certainly impressed a few people since forming two years ago, and the sheer diversity of this new set is impressive.

But the versatile stylings also make for a mixed bag: opener World Blues boasts a satisfyingly filthy slide guitar hook, but Rock And Roll is bog standard bar-room boogie.

Likewise, the latino R&B and lascivious funk chops of Groove On and Here It Is are skilfully turned, and Neville is still in fine voice at age 65, yet Love And Peace’s blend of reggae and Eagles-y MOR doesn’t quite convince. Still, full marks for the adventure, if not for the end result.

Johnny Sharp
Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.