With Blood Brothers, Dallas Burrow deftly pays off on the promise made on his first two albums – both solid efforts that seemed to be building up to this, his strongest album yet. Musically and lyrically, it builds on from that solid foundation with a baker’s dozen of remarkably tight Americana songs that bring to mind folks like Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark and his father’s buddy Townes Van Zandt.
The album title, in fact, is a reference to a story Burrow often tells from the stage about his father, Mike Burrow, and Van Zandt. After a night of drinking, the duo and a couple of others shut down the bar and ended up at a late-night party where Van Zandt insisted they all become blood brothers to ensure they’d be forever cosmically linked. You can hear the timeless influence of Van Zandt all over Blood Brothers.
Burrow’s deep, husky vocals are perfectly contrasted by strong guitar throughout, along with fiddle and the occasional pedal steel and trumpet. Burrow brought in fellow songwriter and musician Jonathan Tyler to produce this record and the two managed to harness a lot of the energy from Burrow’s live shows on the album.
The record’s opening track and early single “River Town,” is familiar to anyone who’s even been to Austin or nearby New Braunfels where life in the summer revolves around swimming holes and the river. Even taking a seemingly pedestrian topic like that, Burrow manages to add poetry to his lyrics. Elsewhere, he turns his talent to love songs, like on “Starry Eyes,” but some of the most memorable tracks here are his road songs (“Motel 6”) and his character studies (“Wild Bill”).
At a time when country music radio is dominated by mulleted party bros railing against Bud Light, Burrow’s music and vibe, especially on Blood Brothers, seems much more tethered to late-‘70s Austin country music scene, when hippies and rednecks regularly mingled at the Armadillo World Headquarters and Gruene Hall. There is a timelessness to the songs here that are bound to age well in the decades to come.
