Ridley Bent - Blam (Pre-Order)

In stores November 27.

"Ridley Bent is one of Canada's strongest singer-songwriters, an exceptional lyricist who seems to have an endless cast of oddball characters running around in his head."
- John P. McLaughlin, The Vancouver Province

Released in 2005, Blam! was the debut album from Canadian songwriter Ridley Bent and remains a strange, singular record in Canadian music. Produced by Chin Injeti, the album brought together five years of Bent's songwriting, mixing country and folk storytelling with hip-hop, funk, rock and programmed production. At the centre of it all is Bent's writing. The songs play out like short stories, populated by criminals, drifters, desperate characters and people generally making questionable decisions. Bent grew up listening to hip-hop alongside the country music his father introduced him to, while writers including Louis L'Amour and John Steinbeck helped shape his approach to narrative and character. Those influences collide throughout Blam!, with Bent delivering detailed, often darkly funny stories over an unlikely mix of acoustic guitars, beats, scratching and distorted riffs. Songs including “David Harley's Son,” “Fruit Pickers (In Dubious Battle),” “Rattlesnake Moonshine” and “In the Trunk of a Black Lexus” established Bent as a songwriter with an unusually cinematic approach to storytelling, while “Suicidewinder” became the album's best-known song. Released at a time when the lines between indie rock, hip-hop, roots and country were beginning to blur, Blam! didn't fit particularly comfortably into any of them. Twenty years later, that's largely what makes the record interesting. It's an odd snapshot of Canadian independent music from the mid-2000s and the starting point for an artist who would go on to become much more closely associated with country music. Blam! is being made available again more than two decades after its original release.