Review

I was digging through some old emails today, and found this. I should have posted it a while ago, but here it is:

Matt Munson and Bill Fischer were rock-and-roll stablemates from Southern California quartet My New Invention, a band whose existence roughly coincided with the Clinton Administration and caused slightly less controversy and heartache – a shortcoming mostly due to the band's confined geographical range.



But during their spare time offstage, Matt and Bill enjoyed switching to acoustic guitars and hamming it up with wide-ranging songs, duets, and gimcrack instrumental blasts performed for friends, lovers, and folks just passing through. Over time these just-for-fun sessions evolved into a jokey "splinter band" that came to be called Black & Blue.



Now by some folks reckoning, that moniker is a bit mysterious, and Bill says he can't really remember how or when they chose it, but it might have been inspired by the execrable 1975 Rolling Stones album Black and Blue. Or, it could have been that shiner Matt received in a 1993 wherehouse brawl during his days as a shipping foreman. And then again, maybe it referred to the colors of those matching Fender Squier electric guitars the two axe-men played during the band's earliest days.



Whatever the original meaning, Black & Blue has come to represent an attitude, a devil-may-care indifference to the glancing blows and haymakers thrown around by fate, and a determination to suck in your gut and keep on singing those magical old songs – and some just written – anything so long as it's a fair piece of alright, that's got a good riff with a spring in its step, and a bittersweet harmony – like their new single, "Second Time Around." Yep, those are songs that sneak up on your troubles and club them like baby seals – with occasionally disarming honesty and and a good beat. That's Black & Blue, to a "T."



- Chuck Bacon, New Beat Monthly, January 2009