Artist:     Brad Brooks

Album:     God Save the City

Label:     Self-released

Release Date:     10.23.20

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There was a chance Brad Brooks wasn’t going to live to make God Save the City, but the Bay Area rocker beat throat cancer, escaping death with his expressive voice intact. Still a little rough, it’s tender when wounded, but soaring and mighty when inspired and provoked.

Before getting perhaps the worst diagnosis a singer could ever receive, Brooks was bound for the studio, envisioning a grander, more elaborate successor to 2012’s critically acclaimed Harmony of Passing Light. Confronting his own mortality and the country’s corrosive political malignancy with forthright honesty, empathy and passion, Brooks went a different route, spilling his heart and soul all over God Save the City. This less considered, but more human and organic, approach to music-making pays off, with Brooks’ blue-eyed soulfulness surfacing in a smooth, funky “Feel the Might” and “The Chance,” both found swimming in the rich, pearly allure of early Hall & Oates.

Brooks doesn’t play coy here, with the rousing, electrifying title track running headlong down Exile on Main Street railing against income disparity and stealing glam-rock energy from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust days. Just as spirited, the high-flying “Strange Fruit Numb” is a religious experience, grabbing onto the coattails of The Black Crowes in a rollicking Civil Rights riot of Southern rock groove and transcendent glory, with female backing vocals offering powerful testimony.

It’s hard to anticipate Brooks’ next move on God Save the City, as “Lee Marvin’s Uzi” rolls on with rugged, garage-rock swagger and drive, all while lightheartedly relating details of a brush with fame and celebrity weaponry. Slow in getting up off the mat, the affecting piano ballad “Millionaires” rises, as Brooks delivers a majestic singing performance full of raw emotion, while the dark, lazy sweep of “Burn It Off” and its wafting pedal steel travel a lonely desert highway and a bittersweet, grippingly melodic “Heartbreak of Fools” displays a lovely string arrangement. Given all he’s been through, you can’t blame Brooks for appealing to a higher power on God Save the City. His prayers, it seems, have been answered.

—Peter Lindblad