The Raymen - Long Lonely Highway FLAC

On their album Long Lonely Highway, The Raymen deliver a bit of fantastic blistering psycho-billy rock n’ roll, an album filled with a modern take on an old attitude, perfectly suited for a white knuckle drive into the sunset across the southwestern desert in a vintage topdown Buick on old Route 66 … though that being said, this is without a doubt their most tender release, delivered with vocals that seem to be beamed in from another side of the universe, deep and low keyed, even covering the songs “Blue Moon” and “Suspicion,” along with several others that are totally unexpected and enchantingly out of place.

Most often their music [from other albums] pulls out all of the stops relentlessly, drenched in reverb laden echo, with the Raymen seeming dead set on raising the ghosts of Howlin’ Wolf, Link Wray, and even Hank Williams, determined though a sacred vision and obligation to revitalize the world by bringing America’s forgotten musical heritage to everyone, infusing their listeners with a diabolic nightscape for a nitro fueled wide eyed musical adventure most suitable for a crackling AM radio, with a backseat filled with burger wrappers and crushed beer cans … where stop signs don’t exist, and speed limits are a suggested concept.

Long Lonely Highway wholeheartedly embraces the nature of confusion, where country-western meets rock-a-billy and morphs into some oddly delightful collection of psycho-billy. Yes, without a doubt, this ‘is’ the devil’s music, it will embrace your wicked soul, and send you down a path to an age when the fear of the atomic mushroom cloud hung over everyone, when the only option was to subvert that fear and turn it loose through amplification.

*** The Fun Facts: The band took their name from another great artist, Link Wray and his Ray Men, though these cats combined Ray and Men into one single play on words, due to the strange sense of humor of Hank Ray, the group’s founder.

The Reyman’s derived the album’s title from the Elvis Presley Nashville Collection: 1960 - 1968, which was composed of alternate takes of established hits … with this release certainly defining the phrase ‘alternate takes.’

Review by Jenell Kesler