PHOTO: BEN TAYLOR-VIVIAN | Old-school Australian rockers Datura4 return in April with their fourth studio album, West Coast Highway Cosmic, an ode to the open road and lost legends of rock and roll. Their latest single, “You Be the Fool,” takes us on a sun-soaked trip from the 1970s to now.
With its fuzzy blues-rock riff dipped in psychedelia, “You Be the Fool” sounds like “Roadhouse Blues” covered by Count Five. Reliable set pieces from the classic rock canon in unexpected variations make the song feel at once fresh and familiar: a wailing harmonica which might have been filched from Howlin’ Wolf by the Rolling Stones, a funk undercurrent that smacks of Stevie Wonder, a falsetto refrain which—down to the lyric “What you gonna do?”—seems to echo Gary Clark Jr. on “What About Us.”
“We’d had the main riff kicking around for a while. During our shows we’d regularly incorporate it into our extended jams of ‘Demon Blues’ from our first album. The more we jammed on it, the more I thought it would be cool to extract a song out of it,” says frontman Dom Mariani. “The verses came from another unfinished tune. I was able to marry the two together. The contrast between the straighter rocking verses and the funky blues groove of the main riff and chorus worked nicely.” Listeners will likely agree; “You Be the Fool” is eminently grooveable, and West Coast Highway Cosmic promises more good grooves to come.
Datura4’s new studio album West Coast Highway Cosmic will be released April 17th on limited edition vinyl, CD, and digital / streaming formats via Alive Naturalsound Records. Pre-order the ’70s Psych Splatter Vinyl here.