Wreckless Strangers is one of my favorite kinds of bands. The California-based outfit is a loose conglomeration of Bay Area session musicians and longtime friends who intermittently gather to write and make music. The relaxed design produces egoless music within a traditional music sphere and the genuine joy you hear in their songs never sounds forced. There’s substance to the music, as well. These are not loose jam sessions recorded for posterity but, instead, complete songs with meaningful lyrics and committed performances.
URL: https://wrecklessstrangers.com/
“You Just Hurt” perfectly illustrates that. Wreckless Strangers begin the track in classic fashion with the assertive yowl of slide guitar. It sets a tone the song never surrenders. The band has embraced the label “country soul” to describe the music they write and record together and that’s fine but “You Just Hurt” is steeped in blues. It’s definitely soulful, effortlessly so, but you don’t require new labels for this fresh reinvention of a timelessly potent formula.
The lyrics are cut above your standard writing for the genre. There’s none of the purist repetition, freewheeling theft of time-tested imagery but, instead, a genuine effort to personalize the genre’s tropes without sacrificing their recognition. One of the band’s singers and the song’s co-author David Noble lights the words up thanks to his artful passion and phrasing. His voice provides the track with a complementary counterpoint that never fails.
Slide guitar fans will love the playing on this song. Wreckless Strangers aren’t averse to building the song around it as listeners are treated to a 30 second plus introduction focused on the slide alone. It ramps up its intensity like a gathering storm until the band falls in behind it. It’s an opening that will be akin to a hard kick in the rear for many and hook them into the song. The challenge for Wreckless Strangers is to keep them hanging around and, after it’s over, coming back for more.
Several factors help pull that off. Their honesty is one of the keys. The band and their latest single wear no mask, never pretend to be anything else than what we hear, and “speaks” to listeners in lyrical and musical language causal and longtime music fans will understand. Bringing the personal and common together in a songwriting package is a rare and underrated gift because any competent songwriter can do it while very few are capable of convincing their audience that it’s so.
“You Just Hurt” doesn’t sound premeditated. It sounds lived. The songwriters may not have endured what it depicts verbatim, but you come away from hearing this song certain they have a frame of reference for what they’ve written. It isn’t an act of imagination alone. This is the stuff that makes the greatest songs – the chance they provide us to walk a mile in another person’s shoes knowing that the artist has traveled those same miles as well. It creates a closeness between performer and audience few other mediums can equal or surpass. Wreckless Strangers aren’t just a band, really, but a musical collective with no other agenda except to create.
Claire Uebelacker