ARTIST(S) – RELEASE TITLE - Fontana North

MY BABY LIKES TO BOOGALOOWHIP IT ON YAMANANIMOUSLET'S JUMP AROUND SOMEDEATH BED BLUESRelease Date: August 18/09richhope.commyspace.com/richhopeCatalogue No: CD09SBR106Genre: AlternativeGenre Code: 2WHEN MY LIGHT COMES SHININGYOU'RE AN ICE QUEEN, BABYROLLIN' ONBLACKBIRD BAKEY PIE BLUESFormat: CDOrder Due Date: July 23/09Price Code: SPBox Lot: 30richy@sandbagrecords.comsandbagrecords.comRICH HOPE LIKES IT DIRTY.You can tell because he uses the word a lot – ‘dirty’.And you can hear it in the “no-bass trash fest” he calls Whip It On Ya - hissecond album of Evil Doings. “I’ve always been drawn to that sound onguitar,” he says. “Dirty. Shitty. I want that amp to sound like it’s hurting.Like it’s really making a bad noise. Hound Dog Taylor’s guitar sound is thegreatest thing to me. That’s dirty.”2005’s Rich Hope and His Evil Doers signaled Hope’s descent into the bellyof the beast, with half of its running length dedicated to the dirt and theshit that came to define his sound in the subsequent years. By his ownadmission, it was a conflicted record.“I was caught between a collection of old songs that I was very sure of,”he explains, “and the new ones which were in a whole new directionI was going, but not feeling quite at home.”“I’m sure it’s what I should be doing now,” he adds.Well, yeah. Three years of incendiary live shows have brought Hope andhis erstwhile tub-thumping partner the Cleethorpes Crasher aka AdrianMack into their own idiom. Part Mississippi hill-country blues, part rock‘n’ roll, and in all ways the work of a two-man trio, the Evil Doers youhear on Whip It On Ya is built on the Crasher’s swervy pocket, and Hope’salways capricious muse. In other words, it’s a live record.“Shows were not about what song should be played anymore,” Hopestates. “We just got in the space where we wanted to play boogie bluesmusic and rock ‘n’ roll, the way Bo Diddley would play a show.”On stage, Mack keeps a tight bead on his frontman, who habituallyimprovises through new variations on the one-chord dirge (“RollinOn’”), the cracker soulman persona (“My Baby Likes to Boogaloo”,“Mananimous”), or the Tex Avery hillbilly (“Ice Queen”). And to keep ithonest, the pair showed up at the studio in early 2008 with a two-takeonly mandate and at least three songs that had never been played intheir entirety before.“Whip It On Ya” and “Blackbird Bakey Pie Blues” bookend matters withtwo shots of Evil Doing at its most concentrated. The first is urgent,demented, and “horny”, in Hope’s words – a hopped up, elastic shufflethat makes your eyes spin. The second puts a big backbeat behindHope’s wrangling of a single chord.“Death Bed Blues” meanwhile finds the pair laying back. “It turned outheavy,” Hope comments, about an idea – no more than a riff - he’d beennoodling with for two years, live, nude, and right before people’s eyes.“It sat there wanting to be a song, and it never got to be a song,” Hopecontinues. “I put up the antennas one day.”Same goes for “Let’s Jump Around Some”, which is “Hound Dog”,“Psychotic Reaction”, and “Milk Cow Blues” appended to Hope’s laundrylist of friends, heroes, and fellow-travelers.But the centrepiece of Whip It On Ya, and the purest expression of theEvil Doin’ manifesto - from its one-day turnaround, sly lyrical nod towardsSon House, and it’s hefty spiritual weight - is the street-corner gospel“When My Light Comes Shining”.“We just fuckin’ nailed it,” Hope says, with a hint of awe, as if somethingabout its creation was out of his hands. “It’s not a light you want to closeyour eyes to,” he asserts. “It’s a light you wanna step into and see. Andit’ll take all that earthly pain away. Everybody’s got shit, and anxiety, andsadness, and we all go through a lot of pain to get through life. Life istough. Tough. That’s what it’s about.”If these words seem a little jarring coming from an Evil Doer, pleaseconsider that Hope’s project has always been to do God’s work with theDevil’s music. “There’s a lot of bad juju out there,” he says. “We’re justkicking back at it. Let’s have a beer, let’s have a dance, it’ll be okay.” Turnsout the Evil Doers are just taking the fight down there, so they don’t gottado it up here, as it were.“That’s right,” he says. “We’re just making a house call.”778632 903258