Artist:     The Record Company

Album:     All Of This Life

Label:     Concord Records

Release Date:     6.22.2018

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I became an enthusiastic fan of the Record Company based on their live performances; their first CD, 2016’s Give It Back To You, confirmed my expectation that this band was on track for success. Now, with over a year of solid touring behind them and the appearance of this new album, the trio does seem to be on track—albeit more of a train track than of a shooting star.

All of This Life is a solid album, and certainly in line with Give It Back To You—so much so that I’m guessing a few of these songs just didn’t make it onto the first album. All the elements of the Record Company’s gritty sound are here in spades: compelling guitar, dynamic percussion and throbbing bass back lead vocalist Chris Vos, whose voice skips from raunchy baritone to stratospheric falsetto in a beat.

At BottleRock Festival in Napa, CA, we asked Vos about his favorite songs off the album, and he neatly sidestepped the answer, saying, “There’s worse things to do than be playing the same songs when you’re 70. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have fresh material, it’s fun to figure it out. The only problem with older material, you can get into the ‘going through the motions’ thing, but you try not to. You try and stay fresh and focused.”

Listeners, on the other hand, may play favorites. The opening track, “Life To Fix,” has that bluesy/hard rock combination the guys do so well, starting off with a simple guitar and building the quickstep drums, an irrepressible combo guaranteed to have your whole body moving by the first chorus.

This band has three excellent musicians, and though guitar and vocals from Chris Vos often take center stage, Vos is truly an equal partner with bassist Alex Stiff and drummer Marc Cazorla, whose instruments often take lead. For example, the terrific song “Roll Bones” starts out with only staccato sticks and a bass line, bringing in vocals soon thereafter; Vos’ resonator guitar only shows up about halfway through the tune, as it builds. Not everything is perfection on All of This Life, however. In “You And Me Now” a three-minute-plus song, we hear the phrase “nothing, nothing at all” some 25 times, which is at least 20 times too many—but that’s the exception rather than the rule here.

Give It Back To You was nominated for a Grammy last year, and we asked Vos about the best and worst aspects of the road to stardom. “I’m fucking loving this. The best part is getting to do this for a living, getting to be an artist for a living. The hardest part is staying healthy and positive, because you’re away from home so much, you’re on the road, you don’t sleep right…and there’s always a tendency to have too much fun.”

I guess what goes around comes around, ‘cause the Record Company sure knows how to dole out the fun.

—Suzy Nelson