Salle paroissiale - Salle paroissiale (50th anniversary)

Parish Hall's self-titled debut album remained blues rock's best-kept secret for five decades. This 50th anniversary reissue, with fully analog mastering by Kevin Gray, finally gives it the pressing it deserved.

Fantasy Records released the album in 1970, just as the blues rock explosion launched by Cream and Free was in full swing. Parish Hall presented itself as a stripped-down trio: Gary Wagner on guitar, piano and vocals, John Haden on bass, Steve Adams on drums, with Ray Shanklin on production. They only made one album together before fading, the kind of one-shot that usually means a band cared more about groove than career, and left behind something more concise and rawer than most of what actually made the charts that year.

“My Eyes Are Getting Heavy” opens the album with a slow, heavy blues riff that never quite wakes up, “Dynaflow” is the muscle car track of the album, with its low-end torque and Wagner's guitar going at full throttle, and “Somebody Got the Blues” does exactly what it says, sung like a man who's personally checked it out. “Silver Ghost” slows things down to become closer to a lament, proof that this trio could brood as well as ignite.

Fifty years later, this reissue finally allows this force to express itself as it always should have done.