#1 - Blanche - What This Town Needs

BLANCHE - What This Town Needs (V2 Records)

With a sophomore album set to drop this spring, Detroit’s premiere gothic country band Blanche gives fans a treat with this five-song enhanced EP featuring a live video of the band performing “So Long Cruel World” on New Year’s Eve, 2003. Featuring Dan John Miller (ex-Goober and the Peas, the band that Jack White got his start with), Blanche sticks primarily to real country music on this short player, the exception being the title track which sounds a bit like the Georgia Satellites with Jenny Lewis on backing vocals. The female vocals, which really stand out on all of Blanche’s recordings, are supplied by Miller’s wife, Trace Mae Miller, an accomplished artist in her own right. A cover of The Rolling Stones’ "Child of the Moon" is nearly unrecognizable thanks to the slower tempo and the inclusion of the pedal steel guitar. Both "Scar Beneath the Skin" and "Never Again" sound like tunes you'd expect to hear coming out of side street bars in Nashville, the ones that the tourists are afraid to enter. If the songs featured on this EP are any indication of the sound of the forthcoming full length, Blanche stands a good chance of changing a lot of people's opinions on country music.