The blues nomad known as Ruben Bertrands has released a new album that showcases his talent as a musician and a band leader. The Other Side of the Coin is Bertrands’ third album (his first with Spectra Music Group) and continues to develop his blues aesthetic.
Bertrands’ background resembles what the old blues fathers might have looked like if their lives had played out internationally. A native of Belgium, Bertrands started busking in Brussels when he was 21. Using his harmonica as a passport, he wandered the world, playing in cities like New Orleans and living in Spain, Italy, and Morocco. He weathered the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Canary Islands and recorded his first two albums, After Hours and Blues Messenger, during that time. The latter of the two albums shows his penchant for the unusual as he juxtaposes spare arrangements of classic numbers like “Catfish Blues” and “Wayfaring Stranger” with field recordings of a Catholic church service in Cabanyal, Valencia.
The Other Side of the Coin isn’t nearly so bold or spartan, but it is not without its eccentricities and attention to structure. “Jumpin’ Turnstiles” opens the album with a field recording of what sounds like a subway stop. As the subway arrives, the band enters with drummer Natan Goessens playing a train beat. A guitar comes to life while another picks up the rhythm with either Samuel Cambian or Geert Zonderman on bass. Meanwhile, producer Hugh Pool makes psychedelic noises on a theremin and Bertrands sings, “It’s been a long time comin’, Lord/ Comin’ round the bend.”
It’s loose and trippy but makes a set of bookends with the final number “Second Line Fever.” In that song, Goessens revises the train beat as a New Orleans march while Tom Eylenbosch plays a rousing gospel style that is as infectious and joyful as “Jumpin’ Turnstiles” is strange and weary. Taken as two songs on their own, they would sound like novelty tracks. But in the context of the journey that The Other Side of the Coinrepresents, they create a sense of completeness that might otherwise not be there.
The album’s title is an apt description for the two “sides” that represent different settings for the blues. The first five songs feature the electric sound of the loose, jam-based material of “Jumpin’ Turnstiles.” “Tombs” reprises that jam, while the seven-minute instrumental “Aunt Mimi’s Off Her Meds” is tighter, funkier, and features killer solos from Eylenbosch (on electric piano) and probably Belgian bluesman Ozgur Hazar on guitar. (Three great guitarists contribute to this album: Hazar, jazz guitarist Rotem Sivan, and Pool.) Bertrands has a great vocal on his hard-hitting version of the St. Louis Jimmy Oden song, “Goin’ Down Slow” (which Howlin’ Wolf recorded in 1961) and takes his first harmonica solo on the Rolling Stones-influenced “Big Wave.”
The coin flips with the sixth song. The swinging instrumental “Café De Levante” opens with Bertrands blowing his clean harp over the piano, bass, and drums combo that dominates the last half of the record. They follow it up with the Tom Waits-tinged “Revue” where Bertrands talks his way through a late-night scene not as well pictured as what Waits could conjure up, but the tremendous solo from Eylenbosch and the question mark ending on the name of a mysterious punk makes you forget what you’re missing. The Latin-inflected “Belle of the Bog” features a bass solo and another great piano solo in between Bertrands singing a warning to someone walking “the streets at night” (maybe he has that mysterious punk in mind).
The Other Side of the Coin is less about Bertrands skill as a storyteller, or even his musical talent, than it is about his skill at using his band to evoke different aspects of the blues. Recorded first in his native Belgium with later in New York with Pool, Bertrands somehow manages to keep the material reigned in and focused on his vision for the album, which sometimes barely includes him.
Of the nine songs, he sings on six and plays harmonica on four with only two significant solos. Most of the solo space is given to his band (especially the incomparable Eylenbosch), and on “Aunt Mimi’s Off Her Meds,” one of the album’s standout tracks, he doesn’t appear at all. In a genre that has been chained to guitar heroes for decades, this makes a significant statement about what matters to Bertrands when playing the blues. He focuses on using his band as an instrument, not as a free ride for solo space, and that’s a refreshing take on the blues indeed.
Christopher Raley
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