Gulf Coast Records [Release date : 27.02.26]

Garret T. Willie’s ‘Bill’s Café’ is a powerful statement of intent.

Were it not for the fact that he hails from a little rural town called Alert Bay, off the northern tip of Vancouver Island in West Canada, you would be tempted to call this album a coruscating blue-collar rock and blues album.

As it is, it’s an album buoyed by Willie’s rough hewn, riff driven style and is shot through with a relentless roadhouse boogie undertow.

It rocks hard, while his songs occasionally looking beyond the well trodden boogie path.

It’s an impressive work in progress from a vocalist whose world-weary phrasing belies the fact that he’s only in his mid-twenties.

He generates his cornerstone bluster with a rip-roaring guitar style and a voice that could shatter glasses at 3 paces, leaving award winning producer Tom Hambridge to funnel the unremitting energy into 9 songs which showcase Willie’s strengths.

We are levered into a double helping of rock-a-boogie before Willie broadens his palate to explore some light and shade in a feisty blues-rock style that serves his song narratives well.

The album title ‘Bill’s Café’ references his grandfather’s pool hall café in Alert Bay, British Columbia, while the mix of his own musical explorations and reflective narratives mirror his own journey so far from B.C. to Nashville.

So while there’s the big sounding ‘Small Town People’ – on which a Jon Harvey (Monster Truck) style vocal attack and big guitar avalanche is in sharp contrast to the ‘Small Town’ he sings about – it is soon counterweighted by the Nashville tinged ‘Golden Highway’.

The latter is an acoustic-into-electric Hammond embedded arrangement which gives the clearest indication of where producer Hambridge sees the future for his young charge.

In his bluesier moments, Willie’s vocal phrasing recalls Howlin’ Wolf and Captain Beefheart, as on the opening barn-burner ‘Hypnotic’.

It’s a confident opener with a mid-number, sledgehammer blues tempo change, before reverting to a roadhouse rocking style.

The following ‘Devil Doll’ is more concise and employs a booming vocal with some shrill slide playing on an intense wall of sound.

Better still, is the powerful boogie ‘Going To Toronto’, which to these ears should have been the lead single from the album.

It’s the kind of song which suggests a mix of the autobiographical with the imagined, though Willie apparently lives by the motto, “if you haven’t lived it, don’t sing it.”

He cleverly records the song with two different vocal lines, before settling on a satisfying double tracked end-result, (not too dissimilar in its raw power to Clutch’s Neil Farron).

The exuberant accompanying piano and his blistering guitar solo give the track real heft.

He finds a new equilibrium on the pulsating groove and catchy hook of ‘Get It Done’, while the afore mentioned ‘Small Town People’ adds lyrical irony: “She likes small town rhythm way more than she loves me.”

At the three quarter point of the album, he slips into two blues related tracks, on which ‘High Beam Blues’ surprisingly eschews an expected guitar solo, while on the stripped down autobiographical ‘Young Country Blues’, he pushes his vocal into Omar Dykes (from Omar & The Howlers) territory, suggesting he’s totally at ease with his own material.

‘Bill’s Café’ is a brave stab at re-contextualising the familiar rock-a-boogie genre. It is to be hoped that the closing exclamatory ’I’m late’ isn’t a presciently titled, as it’s the kind of visceral enduring rocker that reminds us of John Fogerty.

In sum, Garret T. Willie does enough to suggest he has the energy, musical chops and writers vision to channel his life experiences into songs which will define his own style in the not too distant future. *** ½

Review by Pete Feenstra

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12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003 – 2025 (Melodic Hard Rock)
14:00-16:00 The Best of 2003 – 2025 (Singer Songwriter)

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