Ridley Bent – September/October 2004
Who: Ridley Bent
What: the good, the bad and the ugly
Where: Vancouver, BC
To Contact: MapleMusic, 30 St. Clair Ave. W., #103, Toronto, ON M4V 3A1 (416) 961-4332.
You can’t not listen to this guy. He’s an extraordinary storyteller, a vivid, character-driven wordsmith, who also plays guitar. Produced by ex Bass Is Base’s Chin Injeti at Vancouver’s Hipposonic, the album, Blam!, is a mix of country, folk, hip-hop and rock, played by an assortment of helping hands. But the music is really just garnish to Ridley Bent’s voice and words. A cappella, he’d still be that good. Told in a cool ravaged country and western talk-twang, his fiction covers all the juicy topics – drugs, guns, murder, love and the wrong side of the law. On “David Harley’s Son”, a funky acoustic folk-rap, he tells of pa, a good man but bad pop (who is also a cop). You gotta hear it to believe it; it’s a mini movie script. His cool cowboy style makes you believe he’s gonna mosey on up to your front door, gun drawn. The funky finger-snapping story of “The Devil & Coltrane Henry” rocks, while “Rattlesnake Moonshine” is a loving ballad about his dead ma and insane pa. Fiction, people, fiction. That’s what Ridley Bent creates, outlaw odes.
