Paul Ruddick and the Sidemen hail from Canada, not exactly a nation that immediately comes to mind as a haven for great blues bands. There was King Biscuit Boy and Crowbar 30 odd years ago, and, uh...well...who cares? Now there is Paul Reddick and The Sidemen, and their debut release does nothing less than show the stateside boys how it is done. Maybe I shouldn't characterize RATTLEBAG as a blues CD, or Paul Reddick and the understatedly-named Sidemen as a blues band. There are people who don't like blues who would still enjoy this CD, who would blast this thing at full volume after a night of too many beers and too little love. As I listened to RATTLEBAG I thought, wistfully, of nights when my life was going right off the tracks and into the toilet, nights when I could have used music like this, music that taps into the motherlode of emotion and mines it for all it is worth and comes back for more.

Reddick bears just a faint resemblance to John Hiatt, plays harp like a Paul Butterfield understudy, and sings like an angel just kicked out of heaven for going on a bender. The Sidemen-- they are too good to be described only in terms of being somebody's "band" ---throw in enough sweat and grease to keep a MacDonald's going for 20 years. Reddick and The Sidemen, together--- and, I suspect, separately as well ---are just about unbeatable.

The mistake that most bluesmen make in contemporary releases is that 1) they confuse being overwrought with being emotive and/or 2) their material is, to put it bluntly, pisspoor; they do the chord changes in the time-honored way and hope for the best. This is not the case with RATTLEBAG, folks. Mostly original material, RATTLEBAG is nothing less than a Rosetta Stone of the blues. Anyone who believes that the blues all sounds alike (and, from the lion's share of releases from the past 20 years, they could be forgiven for this misapprehension) will have their world rocked by Reddick and the Sidemen. There's everything from the acoustic blues of Sleepy John Estes ("Blind River Bound") to Bob Dylan (yeah, dammit, Bob Dylan) circa BLONDE ON BLONDE ("Pearl River Blues") to Paul Butterfield's Chicago stylings to Stevie Ray Vaughn's Texas blues ("Rattlebag") to Bobby Blue Bland ("Trouble Again") to r & b influenced tracks. While the material is varied, Reddick and The Sidemen keep a cohesive sound flowing throughout; they never lose track of who, and what they are.

The latest tour information I have for these guys shows them sticking pretty close to their Canadian origins. It would be worth a trip up north to see them. And it would be worth opening your wallet to pick up RATTLEBAG, an absolute gem of a CD, no matter what genre you want to file it under. Try 'I', for Incredible. You'll never get it out of your CD player. And you won't care.