Whoooooooaaaaa, and they have done it AGAIN for me. Taranaki’s swamp-blues combo The Mons Whaler has released new single Blood, and I am horizontal with chill-out factor. Absolutely sublime song!

I’m tempted to end THERE, frankly, but I’ll elaborate.

We’ve got a laid-back vibe to the song as it starts. A steel guitar sound, oozing and ooooozing that ringing delta blues tone that makes guitar players the world over melt into the couch with silly grins across their chops. We’ve got a vocal performance with a timbre somewhat in the vein of Kings Of Leon, or L.A.B. atop that bewitching blues gat. It’s conjuring images of misty dawns, a grey/blue morning with the dense, dark green vegetation on the banks of the Mississippi just discernible as you float on your small boat along with the tide. Singing floats across the damp air, from invisible voices across the mist, as the heat starts to rise and the sweat begins to cause your shirt to cling to your back. Another time. A melancholy time of memories and knowledge of things done, that caused the banks to overflow with the tears of forgotten faces once loved.

The Mons Whaler are ridiculously talented. The song pauses, and the mood darkens, as the instruments fire more intensely. The melancholy yet laid-back vibe disappears to yearning, almost a desperation for something to have not been so. Or to have been but to be other than what it was. A message just out of reach. Intangible but hypnotic.

I want to see a promo video for this single! They can do so much with this. It’s bluesy and very much now. It’s also got a thing, a thing that takes you on a journey through the sorrows that brought the Blues into being.

Man o man, just check it out for yourself. These guys have blown me away with this; I really love how completely they’ve caught me in the spell of this track. It’s on their Spotty Fly, and it’s on the Flash-Trax Spotty Fly too. Listen to it very late at night, or very early in the morning. Summer-time. Humid and breezy. Let The Mons Whaler take you there too. You’ll understand what I’m harping on about then.

Intensely good. I love these guys, but this is their best one yet for me.