Miss Quincy and the Showdown: Roadside Recovery

Roadside Recovery is the third album by northern British Columbia resident Miss Quincy, and first for her all-female backing band, the Showdown. It’s notable in at least one respect: it was recorded and produced by Matt Rogers, who is the guitarist in the Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, which was responsible for a really fine pop blues album this year entitled A Real Fine Mess. However, Miss Quincy travels a slightly different road. Sure, she’s blues, but she owes more to the garagey side of the blues, with guitars that sound as though they’ve been scraped alongside a gravel road. And she has a seductive voice that owes more to the women of indie rock than the great blues mamas of tradition. Roadside Recovery shows two distinct sides to the Miss Quincy sound: fiery rockers and slow-burning ballads. Through it all, the band throws whiskey on their sound and then throws a match on it. It’s quite the stuff.

And it’s pretty raunchy stuff, too. Proof is that there’s a song titled here “Wild Fucking West” and that’s not to speak of the fact that Miss Quincy sings of being stuck in “Rush Hour Traffic With a Hangover”. Yet, her backing band of female singers adds a gospel-like touch to the proceedings, which gives the disc a nudge towards the sacred. While the album does run a bit out of gas towards the end by backloading the record with a couple of ballads, at best Roadside Recovery will have you shaking your moneymaker. Opening track “Bad Love”, in particular, has a fuzzbox quality to it, and it’s nice to hear women rocking out with such force. And “Talkin’ Trash” has a doo-wop stride, and it’s the one song that grabs your ear the first time you hear it. Overall, the record is quite enjoyable in all its mid-fi glory, and the throwback aspect to Miss Quincy’s sound will, of course, draw the inevitable comparisons to the Black Keys. However, there’s interesting flourishes, such as the doghouse bass on “Making Money”. While not wholly original, Roadside Recovery is still a pretty good distillation of the blues rock genre, and one is hopeful that Miss Quincy and her gang can find a large following on the bar circuit.