Fricke’s Picks: Soulshake Express
The liner notes in the CD booklet of Heavy Music (Beatville) by Sweden’s Soulshake Express are almost forty years old, borrowed (with a credit) from the back of the Jeff Beck Group’s 1969 howitzer-guitar classic, Beck-Ola: “Today, with all the hard competition in the music business, it’s almost impossible to come up with anything totally original. So we haven’t. However, at the time this album was made, the accent was on heavy music.” If you’re going to quote from the best, you’d better be a bruiser yourself, and the Soulshake Express — singer-guitarist David Eriksson, guitarist Marcus Andersson, bassist Robert Schlyter, drummer Joakim Eriksson and organist Martin Hammar — make all the right noises, as if they were born and raised under the floorboards at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom. If they don’t do it live already, the Express should cover Bob Seger’s crushing 1967 single “Heavy Music.” They’ve got what it takes.