Album Review: Danny Bryant's Red Eye Band, Days Like This

Artist: Danny Bryant’s Red Eye Band
Title: Days Like This
Writer: Rick Galusha

Danny Bryant’s Redeye Band fourth album, Days Like This, is on Britain’s largest independent blues label, Blues Matter – which is also a magazine in the United Kingdom. Concisely, Bryant is a protégé of American Walter Trout.

Heavy handed and immediately apparent, Bryant’s ten track album is drenched with loud guitars and songs that serve as platforms for extended solos. There are glimmers of songwriting as well as apparent references to Bryant’s influences. On the title track Bryant duets with Trout with complex arching solos that prolong notes and cascade back and forth between clashing cymbals. Bryant’s vocals are average and the lyrics are awash with clichés and too predictable.

On the track, Working Overtime, the band winds up the engines to use a Motley Crue-like riff to build into a late period Humble Pie-like arena rock anthem. This is a good entrance album for younger rock listeners branching into the blues genre although this is only a “blues” album in the broadest definition. Well played within a twang-bar genre the band cooks and compliments Bryant’s style which is often without texture or emotional depth. Too often Bryant goes for the rock god lick and thus ‘quelches’ a moment when less could be more. Like his mentor Bryant’s songs are vapid but entertaining and-of-the-moment.