What New York City rockers The Brought Low have always managed to do best is get right to the point, and on their latest offering, the appropriately titled Third Album (Small Stone), the trio make it known right away that they’re open for business. “Old Century Man” is an upbeat rocker that plays directly into the trio’s old fashioned classic rock aesthetic. That song could be said to be the mission statement for the eight tracks following it, but The Brought Low do more sonically than hit overdrive for three minutes at a time and call it a day.

Which is fortunate, if you think about it, because if they did, we would have waited four years for a 27-minute record. And that seems silly somehow.

But no, The Brought Low offer substance in more than just temporal fashion right off the bat. There has always been an underlying emotionality to their songs, a blues-driven sense of loss made palpable to the listener through the vocals of guitarist Ben Smith. “Everybody Loves a Whore” keeps the vibe of the opener going, albeit more aggressively (or many that’s just me reacting to the name), but with “The Kelly Rose,” the band begins to show a personality in their work that 2006’s Right on Time had, at its strongest moments, started to fulfill. “The Kelly Rose” is catchy and memorable — a solid transition into “A Thousand Miles Away,” which takes a wistful, acoustic turn, highlighting a road-weary loneliness in the lyrics that’s perfectly suited to the pop melancholy of the music.

At over six minutes, “My Favorite Waste of Time” is the longest cut so far into Third Album (only “Last Man Alive” surpasses it at 6:22), and it relies on a heavy downbeat punctuated by drummer Nick Heller and a start-stop groove that is one of the best on the record. If you haven’t yet heard this month’s podcast, it’s in there. Smith’s guitar takes a higher tone for the bridge riff, and bassist/backing vocalist Robert Russell provides him a steady foundation on which to rest the song. Since Third Album is already more than half over, we’re about do for another rocker, and “Matthew’s Grave” delivers in catchy fashion the kind of chorus you want to sing along to on the first listen. “Blow Out Your Candles” is the groove giving “My Favorite Waste of Time” its strongest competition, but even with added harmonica from Five Horse Johnson’s Eric Oblander and a vocal tradeoff, the former wins out on its smoky, drunken regretful atmosphere alone.

If there’s ever a textbook on how to write a classic Southern rock ballad without sounding like a jackass, one can only hope a chapter in it will be devoted to “Last Man Alive.” The song capitalizes on the mood set by “A Thousand Miles Away” in naming its loneliness, and as Smith emotes, it’s all the easier to empathize with his predicament of being, “All alone, except for the emptiness, like the moon in the sky.” The simplicity of the lyric is emblematic of The Brought Low’s overall accessibility. We know it’s something we’ve heard before, but that doesn’t stop us from interiorizing or enjoying it in the slightest. It is this ability, to renew well-tread paths, that makes a Brought Low album so special.

They close with Third Album with “Slow Your Roll,” an organ-infused instrumental jam; just about the only place they could really go after “Last Man Alive” and just about the only place they could have put the track where it wouldn’t have been out of place. As it is, it caps Third Album with a revived spirit and notion of improvisation, but, because of its position as the closer, is still somewhat anticlimactic. By the time you realize that, however, the song and album both are over. Nifty trick on the part of the band, but after listening, it’s really only one of the many up their collective sleeve.

The Brought Low are the best rock and roll band in New York. We know this already. It’s a given. What Third Album does is to reaffirm their position as same while introducing several years’ worth of maturity into the songwriting and approach. Listening back to Right on Time and to their self-titled debut before that, the shift in style is apparent but never feels forced. The Brought Low’s is a growth as natural and organic as the tones they emit in their songs, and Third Album proves it’s possible to become a stronger, more intricate performer without sacrificing the edge or immediacy of earlier work. You can’t lose to check it out.

The Brought Low on MySpace

Small Stone Records

Tags: New York City, Small Stone, The Brought Low

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.