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Soledad Brothers’ Steal Your Soul and Dare Your Spirit to Move is dirty, lo-fi garage/punk blues, with an emphasis on the blues. My favorite track is their cover of R.L. Burnside’s “Michigan Line,” an appropriate cover pick with the band’s heavy Detroit connection (their first single came out on Detroit-based Italy Records where they met Jack White, who produced Soledad Brothers’ second single; they also recorded part of Steal Your Soul and Dare Your Spirit Move at Third Man Studios). Allmusic says about the album, “It has been the goal of countless bands to re-awaken the energy of Exile on Main Street-era Rolling Stones into some workable modern sound. Many have tried, but only a few have come close. Detroit’s punk-blues upstarts Soledad Brothers have made a brisk career of just such imitation and prove that imitation is itself the sincerest form of irony. On Steal Your Soul and Dare Your Spirit to Move they make no apologies of their fascination with both British and American blues-rock, and imbue all the lifted riffs and self-serving sexual swagger with enough drunken abandon and reckless energy to almost convince you that they are picking up where the Stones themselves left off. The aptly named “Prodigal Stones Blues” cops the signature Stones riffs and tone of the period, and singer Johnny Walker even intones Mick Jagger’s vocal quirks. On their own “.32 Blues,” where Walker belts oaths and shout-outs overtop fuzzy guitar and greasy saxophone, you are almost convinced that these guys are the real thing. A take on R.L. Burnside’s “Michigan Line” reveals the group’s more reckless side. He sings: “I was raised in a trailer down by the tracks/Where I would lay and listen to the clackety-clack/That’s where I got that hard-drivin’ Soledad beat” on his confessional piece “Miracle Birth.” Whether that is true or just a bunch of sycophantic blues imagery hardly matters. When Walker sings it, he believes it, and that just may be enough.”

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Poet, blues scholar (and manager of the MC5) John Sinclair penned the liner notes for the LP. He writes, “Guitarist and vocalist Johnny Walker and drummer Ben Swank pay serious tribute to the three legendary black revolutionaries, not only assuming their name but honoring the black liberation struggle with a stripped-down, seriously raucous blues attack deeply rooted in the rawest idioms of the African American musical tradition…The Soledad Brothers are no cornball blues revival act but make a fresh, idiosyncratic, soulful extension of the blues into their own life experience and out into the world at large.”

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