Leo Lyons Hundred Seventy Split – Movin’ On
Flatiron Recordings
10 songs – 52 minutes
A professional musician since age 16 when he started touring Germany with guitarist/vocalist Alvin Lee in The Jaybirds – the band that eventually rebranded itself as Ten Years After, bassist Leo Lyons truly is one of the founding fathers of blues rock. And the 80-year-old native of Mansfield, England, still lays down a pleasing, heavy beat as the leader of Hundred Seventy Split, a group that works in old-school power-trio format with fresh ideas.
In addition to his skill on the bottom, Leo went on to become one of the top producers in the U.K., recording hits for others along with a multitude of other projects, including musical theater and TV, movie and cartoon soundtracks and work as a songwriter for a Hayes Street Music in Nashville.
He’s also released nine solo albums, two with the band Kick and seven others with Hundred Seventy Split prior to this one, too, a band that includes vocalist Joe Gooch, who replaced Lee in Ten Years After in 2003, and a guitarist who’s been a cog at Leo’s side ever since.
They co-founded this group as a TYA side project in 2010, released the debut CD, The World Won’t Stop, shortly thereafter and left TYA to go on their own three years later. The sensational Damon Sawyer, a longtime friend, has been kicking out a heavy beat on the drums since the group’s send disc, HHS.
Conceived during COVID, penned by Lyons, Gooch and longtime songwriting partner Fred Keller, this disc was recorded live with minimal overdubs with Sawyer at the controls at Crescent Studio in Swinton, England. From the intro to “Walking in the Devil’s Shoes,” the tribute in Robert Johnson that opens, you know you’re in for an old-style blues-rock treat fueled by Gooch’s fluid, rapid-fire licks. An autobiographical number, Gooch invokes images of going to the crossroads before embarking on a musical career that would take him around the globe for fame and fortune but unable to escape his past.
The rapid-fire “It’s So Easy to Slide” is light-and-breezy and cautionary number that warns it’s easy to slip when you’re close to the edge. So be careful before it’s too late. The action slows temporarily for “The Heart of a Hurricane,” an image-filled reverie about a lady that’s delivered from a borderline motel, modulating in intensity as it flows, before the sweeping “Black River” comes with plenty of TYA appeal as it states that you shouldn’t be afraid when standing in the darkness and wondering about what will happen tomorrow.
The uptempo “Mad, Bad and Dangerous” changed the mood from the jump, dealing with struggles in life, but making it crystal clear that the singer’s going to be in charge no matter what comes his way. Quiet but intense, “The Road Back Home” finds the singer reflecting on the dark period of life before a dramatic musical transformation, “Meet Me at the Bottom,” an acoustic number with a rock-steady swing beat. The powerful “Sounded Like a Train” and “Beneath That Muddy Water,” a Southern rocker with gospel overtones, follow before the rocker “Time to Kill” brings the action to a close.
All meat, no filling, this one’s definitely for you. And it’ll serve as a good, audible lesson to would-be “blues” rockers of the way it should be done, too!