Hightide Blues

(Credit: Taylor Hill)

When you live in the South — even in the South’s main city — music listeners are exposed to a sea of Southern rock revivalists, copycats and originals. There are a ton of them out there, so when an artist excels in the genre it takes something special in the tunes and on the stage to rise against the tide. In this case, ironically, that band is Hightide Blues.

With the release of its second record, this time an eight-song EP called "Love Come Easy," Auburn-based Hightide Blues is truly on to something. On "Love Come Easy," the band does not blaze any new musical ground and therein lies its very strength.

Hightide Blues has wrapped up everything great about southern rock ’n’ roll — soaring riffs, vocal immediacy and a musical earnestness bleary-eyed from the bottle — and packaged it with all the rattle and roll that is worth a good shake to. It makes for an album that sounds like a greatest hits of those favorite rock classics you’ve probably never even heard.

And if that’s the case, you can start with "Love Come Easy."

Seconds into the record’s first spin, southern sonic thunder barrels out of the speakers and into your bones. The opener, “Katie, Can You hear Me?” is a badge of Black Crowes-style soul stomping from the hearty percussion to the meaningful moans and groans of lead singer Paul McDonald’s patented vocal belt. Hell, they even have a tune called Black Crows on the EP.

The band weaves and pivots throughout all the southern style trappings the rest of the way, pairing two bouts of near perfect balladry back-to-back in “Far From Home” and “Dreamin’ Alone” before tearing back onto that righteous rock path with the get-down of “Let It Roll” and the jammy “Merle’s Last Stand.”

By closing time of this EP, you’ll be myspacing these boys to see when you can shake and sweat with the show live onstage. This band’s sound is big and accessible — plain and simple. The Bama boys’ sound is everything you ever liked about The Crowes, Ryan Adams, Lynard Skynard et al, with an alarming immediacy of youth and young manhood. The fact that it’s not a bigger radio and music biz presence is what’s wrong with the industry itself these days.

Still, that can’t stop Hightide Blues from burning a sound ripping through an ocean of musical monotony.