Notes

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Now this time around they got it nailed from the start, filthy dirty analogue organ and spot on drummer. Just the two of them and some filthy dirty organ driven old school blues. They’re from the Southern United States and they say something about being influenced by “piece of shit cars, the criminal justice system, crazyass women and southern religious hypocrisy”. They got the classic blues/soul of John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles, R.L Burnside, Seasick Steve, and yeah a bit of White Stripes/Shellac suss on their side along with that righteous organ sound.

The whole thing is wholesome and they’re setting down there right there with man from the crossroads on the porch sipping cheap beer and doing it just right. Yep, this is good old punk-ass organ driven analogue blues - smoking, filthy, drenched in soul, over-driven and like they say, they’ll have their way and catch you somewhere on the other side. They got soul, they got moody bits, they got stompin bits and they got gospel and they got it nailed from the start with a touch of someone else’s class in the shape of the filthiest dirtiest stompinest version of Nutbush City Limits you ever did hear.

And as for that start of Loose Yourself! Are you sure they didn’t make this album in 1974? Bidin My Time has to be an old jazz soul classic from the 60’s, something off Stax or something, old lost early Otis Reading thing maybe? Can’t be a new song they just wrote? There is a Nina Simone song here and most of it is just nailed down filthy organ driven blues, the kind of thing that makes upstart bands like The Black Keys look like wet behind the ears indie kids in comparison. As cool as f! - [Organ]

For their second album, A Touch of Someone Else's Class, the East Nashville duo travelled to Ohio to record with the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach at his Akron Analog Studio. If anyone knows something about making a two-piece sound bigger than it is, it would be Auerbach, but the choice of engineer was fortuitous in other ways as well. Joining the Heavies for one cut, "Bidin' My Time," was Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney's uncle Ralph, longtime horn player for Waits, and his contribution gives the song a touch of late-night noir that can't be gotten from just anyone.

Still Auerbach's work is one of the keys (no pun intended) to the record's success. Cuts like the leadoff "Nutbush City Limits" and "Loose Yourself" are imbued with a floor-shaking sound, just enough low-end rumble and in-the-red saturation to make the record come alive. Myers studies of the Waits catalog, Booker T and Muscle Shoals soul, and no doubt Nina Simone (the Heavies do a very worthy cover of her seminal "Sinnerman") has paid off in spades. Touch is a gritty triumph, the kind of record that can't be made without more than a little blood and sweat.
Stephen Slaybaugh - [The Agit Reader]