Product Description
WALTER TROUT - SIGN OF THE TIMES
RELEASE DATE SEPTEMBER 5, 2025. ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY!
Great artists take the pulse of their times. In his half-century as a street-level social observer and scaldingly honest songwriter, blues-rock's resilient icon Walter Trout has never told his fans what to think, how to feel, where to stand politically, or what to scrawl on their protest placards. But in an era when his home nation - and the wider world - is ripping at the seams over the battlelines of modern life, the iconic US bluesman's hard-rocking new album, Sign Of The Times, is the primal scream and pressure valve we all desperately need. "I wanted to convey the anger and angst going on in the world," explains the 74-year-old. "For me, writing these songs is therapy. They're not just about what's happening out there, but how it affects you in your head. Sign Of The Times just became the obvious title."
- 1 Artificial
- 2 Blood on My Pillow
- 3 Sign of the Times
- 4 Mona Lisa Smile
- 5 Hurt No More
- 6 No Strings Attached
- 7 I Remember
- 8 Hightech Woman
- 9 Too Bad
- 10 Struggle to Believe
WALTER TROUT
Sign Of The Times
Mascot/Provogue Records
With “Sign of the Times,” Walter Trout’s voice lays bare a voice all its own: grinding, staggering and somehow rising from a mess of shredded guts, trampled dreams and a thumb-screwed soul like a flower sprouting from a crack in rustbelt concrete…a marvel of survival cloaked in a glorious tapestry of scars. It recounts a life few could endure and only Trout (with wife Marie partnering on lyrics) could reveal with such blistering honesty, everyman eloquence and incontrovertible proof that no pen, no brush and – maybe with the exception of Trout himself – no vocal cord could ever articulate human emotion like the electric guitar.
“Artificial” blows the door off the hinges with the cry of ten million carotid arteries spontaneously rupturing through a harp/guitar heaven-bent roar: “WTF happened to anything real?” Don’t even think of listening to “Blood On My Pillow” without your teeth ground firmly in a Bowie knife scabbard, The pain is that real. The singing and playing – driven hard and true throughout by Michael Leasure (d), John Avila (b) and Teddy ‘Zig Zag’ Andreadis (k) – are that good.
The title cut and “No Strings Attached” are exquisitely dark, skull crunching slogs through a post-America America where any melody conjoined to truth this cold is doomed to freeze, shatter, and blow away like gritty stinging ice dust. The soft-and-tender slow dance, “Mona Lisa, Smile” is the last thing you’d expect from a record so thoroughly exploring the brutalization of a soul. But, man, it’s beautiful and it makes you kinda wish maybe Walter Trout’s playing wasn’t that good so his singing would get the mountain of “Wow!” it deserves. And it makes you want to get to heaven just so you can listen to it with Marty Robbins and Flaco Jimenez.
“Struggle To Believe” is like the “Fast & The Furious: The Nuclear Off-Road 18-Wheelers Grand Canyon Death Ride” rocker best heard with your head locked into the Sherwin Williams paint can shaker. Through all that darkness, the whimsy of “High Tech Woman,” the bluesy back porch coziness of “Too Bad” and the Springsteen-esque nostalgia of “I Remember” warm and lift our spirits, sweetening a tough, unrelenting masterpiece by a survivor whose every voice must be listened to again and again.
– Terry Abrahamson
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