Wake up. Drink some beer. Listen to some blues rock. That’s how it has been done since 1972. It might be 2025 now but blues rock is still alive and kicking with “It’s Gonna Get Heavy” by Kev Howell being a possible nine song accompaniment to your morning brew.
Blues rock is generally perceived a blue collar thing and, for most of the album, Kev Howell gets his guitar out and keeps right on down that very track. However, there is more to his game than twelve bars and an amplifier. Political commentary, if of a predictable sort, makes “Mantra” into something of a protest song and “Wine and Roses” demonstrates that his musical reach far exceeds the expectation of a bar crowd on a Friday night. This album isn’t, of course, poetry. No one would expect that. This album isn’t philosophy either. Lyrical obscurity is quite clearly not on the cards. This is, instead, an album of songs that will make sense to a whole lot of people with that ever present conventionality – man was born to play the guitar, after all – being the key that opens the door to more than just another rhyming couplet.
If I were to encounter Kev Howell and his music on a Friday night then I would perhaps feel that God was on my side. However, “It’s Gonna Get Heavy”, as the title suggests, is more than an album of Friday night songs to accompany beer drinking and, for that, Kev Howell is to be commended.