An Album a Day is posted 5 days a week, Monday-Friday
I first heard of ZZ Ward a few years back when her single Put The Gun Down was a fairly successful hit. In many ways how I saw her back then was about the same way I saw Elle King earlier this year; as a breath of fresh air. For the longest time there were no new rock stations around where I live, so I toggle back and forth between top 40 and the same 3 Journey songs being played on the classic rock station. Given how much I listened to pop music I found both ZZ Ward and Elle King’s blues based pop rock to be more than welcome. So today I’m looking at ZZ Ward’s new album The Storm, mostly to see how it matches up against Elle King’s Love Stuff.
The first thing to note about the difference between the two is that while Elle King is a solid rhythm guitarist/banjo player she’s never the one playing lead on her tracks, leaving that up to her backing band. ZZ Ward’s thing is being more of a classic blues frontwoman so she plays lead guitar as well as occasional harmonica soloing. A track like Cannonball provides a good example of Ward’s soloing on a strong blues rock track that has just a hint of pop polish.
The one issue I have with a lot of this album is though is that pop polish makes a lot of it too clean. Whereas Elle King puts forth this dirty and real persona in her music ZZ Ward plays it safe a lot of the time. Tracks like Ghost have a cool kind of darker feel because of the lyrics but some of the middle tracks on this one are very boring. Not to say that Elle King’s album was perfect, Love Stuff had some dull pop or country tracks as well.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like this album and ZZ Ward, but her crossover appeal shows a bit more than King’s. With Elle King’s hits it always felt like it was a fluke that she got on pop radio but a lot of ZZ Ward’s songs have that clean pop sound on top of the blues based music. The strongest songs on this album include Ghost, Cannonball, Ride and Help Me Mama, all of which are strong blues rock tracks with folk and gospel elements.
Overall this is a good album and ZZ Ward is certainly a talented singer and musician, but a lot of her music is a bit too clean and sterile sounding for my tastes. This is less a knock against her and more in praise of Elle King, but I would prefer to listen to Love Stuff. King just has a lot of the nastier elements that I love about blues based music, especially the fuzzed out guitars on Devil Don’t Go and Exs and Ohs. So yeah, solid album but not as good as Love Stuff.
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