Artist: Selwyn Birchwood Band
Album: Pick Your Poison
Label: Alligator Records
Release Date: 5.19.2017
Selwyn Birchwood is a relative newcomer to the blues scene but a guy who is fast making his mark with a growing trail of top-dollar albums under his belt since he picked up two major blues awards at the Blues Foundation’s IBC in Memphis back in 2013.
Last year, the South Florida band stepped up to the plate with their first professional-studio release on Chicago’s Alligator label with the popular, well-received Don’t Call No Ambulance, an album that also featured the fretwork of Joe Louis Walker in parts.
Pick Your Poison is the band’s second Alligator release and again features frontman Birchwood’s searing guitar-work, lap-steel slide-work and gritty, well-pitched vocals alongside thirteen tracks written by Birchwood himself. As a sophomore Alligator release, this album delivers more than its predecessor – no mean feat given the quality and strength of Don’t Call No Ambulance itself. Indeed, if anything, Pick Your Poison is a much more powerful, confident and self-assured offering, high-lighting the strength and power and purpose of Birchwood and the band members who all work flat-out together to produce an album that simply screams quality as it rips and roars along full of blues goodness with every turn and track.
This is a wonderful, soulful, southern bit of music, swampy, searching, stirring and full of excellent delivery, quality and class. Pick Your Poison is well worth grabbing, for sure.
—Iain Patience
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