The Name Droppers – Starshine
Horizon Music Group – 2024
10 tracks; 33 minutes
With their 6th album in the past four years, Starshine (2024), Connecticut blues rock outfit The Name Droppers offer a mix of seedy, poetic lyrics, high energy, and gnarly solos.
In “Red Sea Blues”, one of the best tracks on the LP, engaging rhythm intertwined with guitar melody opens as Rafe Klein sings “blue is in my heart. Red all over the morning news. Has anybody heard of genocide? Think I lost my heart to the Red Sea Blues.” Klein’s vocals are earnest, straining, tender, and sympathetic in the song dedicated to loss, and that carries on with a slow patience, like the long process of grief. Ron Rifkin delivers excellent and haunting organ that send chills and pull on the heart strings. The track is the emotional core of the album.
As bar bands are want to do, The Name Droppers perform several covers. Their reinterpretation of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles, however, is something special. Bobby T Torello offers tasty drums to kick it off, complimented by Klein’s saucy guitar work. While still resembling the original, The Name Droppers leaned heavily into the blues, giving it soul, energy, and gumption. While the vocals are groovy and emphatic, the instrumentation is gritty and entrancing.
The group’s rendition of BB King’s “Sweet Little Angel”, lack the energy and feeling of the original, but stands as a fun cover showing some impressive, gnarly guitar licks.
On “Starshine”, the opening track, the lyrics come across as a mix of Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, with Klein singing “I’ve fallen for the uptown girl with diamonds on her feet.”
“Whiskey” features gravelly vocals, and a funky, blues style in the vein of Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa as a catchy guitar hook threads the song together.
For “Shades of Blue”, a smooth, well-produced track, the band takes a relaxed, melancholic approach. Klein’s voice, smooth and honey-laden, gives a general sense of calm and acceptance. Rifkin’s soothing organ flourishes contributes to a multi-layered feeling of balance in the face of blues and depression. Klein sings about the “light that shines from you” and how it “takes time to mend a soul when there’s no time to cry.”
Simone Browne, the unsung hero of the album as a backup vocalist, offers sweet, angelic vocals on “Joy, Pain, Sky” to close the album. Groovy harmonies ensue as Klein reflects on the joy and pain of life. Klein sing-speaks, grounding the track in reality as Browne’s vocals rise it to an astral plane.
A few tracks are repetitive, but on the whole, the Name Droppers produced a rocking blues album, with solid covers and exceptional lyrics.
