The "New Band To Burn One To" today is Wailin' Storms.
Wailin' Storms is a man of the now who looks to the then. He looks to the raw and primal blues of the 50's. To the time when country music started to swagger and become rock-and-roll. There he sees the urgency in Howlin' Wolf, the conscious oddity in Screaming Jay Hawkins. He learned the teachings of Charlie Feathers and listened to Johnny Paycheck's meditations on murder. He looks to the old and it teaches him. He takes from old and makes his own.
Despite being born the son of a preacher--a Southern Baptist with a no drinking, dancing, gambling, all fun=sin dogma--Wailin' Storms can't help that impulse to do what he wants to do. That bible thump never was music to his ears and it did not take. Maybe it is that older blood in him that makes him this way, the cowboys and wandering backwoodsmen of his descendants that never quite learned to settle down.
He came to the music he makes now through punk. He played in a number of that sorta band in South Texas from the 90s into the oughts. Then he went off on his own in 2005 and began crooning and hollering. He took a slide to his guitar and started playing twangy, gritty sounds. He played around a bit in South Texas and after a performance on a pirate radio station the DJ surmised this was "Texas Doom Country Blues" that he was hearing. That description suited this new thing just fine.
Other's down there in the southern part of Texas had a thing or two to say as well. Richard Guerrero of the Corpus Christi Caller Times once wrote, "while classic influences such as Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers as well as Nick Cave and Glenn Danzig are obvious, Justin's morose wail is a fresh one in an age of cut-and-paste digitized rock. Storms says it best when he characterizes his sound as... ‘the wind's asthmatic voice howling through (an) empty window view.’ Couldn't have said it better myself."
Justin Storms is a one-man wrecking crew of Texas blues, country, doom and despair. Justin has a few tracks on his MySpace and just posted a new song called "When the Rain Starts". Make sure to catch Justin playing out in the Brooklyn, NY area.
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I love Celtic Thunder and anxiously awaited the release of "Storm". It's has its moments, but it's not as good as I had hoped it would be.
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