Hi fellow LAU's!

This is a kind of a small pre-release announcement of our new Album "Turnabout", in the next week it will be available in retail outlets and announced elsewhere but it's already on Soundcloud so I thought I'd post it here on LAU...
This was recorded and produced on Ardour 5 and utilizes a variety of FLOSS and Commercial plugins including Ardour Team, Harrison Consoles, linuxDSP/OverToneDSP, Guitarix, Calf, U-he + SWH, CAPS, TAP, Furse Ladspa's. We also did a lot of work with mic placements and ambient stairwell miking as well as simple line-delays for natural reverbs.

*ALBUM NOTES*

"Turnabout" is our second Rated Blue album release following 2015's "Three Walls Down". Where "Three Walls Down" was initially a collection of songs for posterity "Turnabout" is a more cohesive collection influenced and written against the backdrop of the 2016 US Presidential Election (no we're not American but when the neighbor's house is on fire you pay attention!!). Our core musical inspiration remains the gut-level immediacy of the Blues within the collaborative interactivity of a guitar trio but stylistically and sonically Turnabout roams much farther afield than it's predecessor and is probably best summed up as 'Alt-Blues'.

Turnabout opens with "Straight Up" a funky inspired plea for the media to cut to the chase. "The Second Sister" touches on gender and sexual equality. "When You Got a Name" leans heavily toward Prog and examines lives left behind by the cult of celebrity . The latin influenced title track "Turnabout" traces the insidious rise of Reality TV and it's troubling consequences. "Unsteady" surf-rocks out and rips on the unreliable nature of mavericks and "You" questions a seeming lack of world leadership. "Man On a Wire" closes the album with a collection of vignettes ending on an unresolved chord.

If you are a Blues or Rock fan becoming weary of well-worn Blues cliches and tiring of flashy virtuosity we invite you to give this new release a listen and hope you'll find our 'songs-first' mentality an appealing alternative within the Blues/Roots genre. Thanks for reading (and listening).

Glen, Connor and Pete - Rated Blue

*ALBUM Link: https://soundcloud.com/rated-blue/sets/turnabout