Nick Waterhouse - new album

I wrote a little about this great album from Mister Waterhouse a  month back, it's out now and it's a rocking good time. Listen below.

Turntable Lab's Michu Meszaros says "While Nick Waterhouse may get bound up with funk and soul revivalists like Sharon Jones, he's got his own thing going on. The Los Angeles based singer has pretty much nailed the early rock n' roll sound. 

There's plenty of deft guitar licks, precision honed rhythms and jump up piano work to go around. You get the sense that Waterhouse came to life in the 1950s and has pretty much stayed that way ever since. Along with his original material he covers songs from jazz singer Mose Allison, drummer Isaac "Red" Holt and garage-rocker Ty Segall. 

He sharpens up Allison's delivery on "Let It Come Down" and adds some dark sensibility to Segall's "It #3." Holly takes us back to another time, when rock n' roll was still finding its way."

Nick Waterhouse new single, album

Out soon on LA's Innovative Leisure label, run by DJ Jamie Strong, one half of the DJ duo Haycock and Strong, who were out in NZ last month hosting the legendary day club event The Do-Over, with guests Cosmo Baker and Jazzy Jeff.

Via Rolling Stone: "Nick Waterhouse paid his dues as a teenager in the Orange County garage rock scene, opening for modern psych mainstays Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin and the Growlers. After a stint spinning classic R&B wax on the San Francisco soul scene, he moved back down south to record his debut album, Time's All Gone. He's about to release his second album, Holly, which underscores his dedication to the stylings of Sam Cooke, Sam and Dave and Solomon Burke.

"'This Is a Game' seems good for dancing to, has got a real good syncopation going, and I like singing the word 'visions,'" Waterhouse told Rolling Stone. "I wrote it in a dressing room in Rennes, France after months promoting my last record."

Indeed, the song bears the marks of something that was whipped up in a mad dash. As the sax howls thick, sleazy strands, Waterhouse's slicing guitar darts in, at first referencing surf music and then the hard notes of Chicago blues. Waterhouse's voice is ripped from the mid-Fifties, with a slight reverb referencing the single-microphone recording era. As with so many classics of that era, he caps the song off with a werewolf howl followed by an aggressive organ solo, suggesting that not all games are fun and games."

Holly will be released March 4 on Innovative Leisure records. Meanwhile, you can catch Waterhouse on tour in the US in February.

MORE: Backgrounder on Innovative Leisure, from Billboard