ERIC FIEDOR plays the Electric Blues and is signed to a record label called Sensitive Redneck Records, a dichotomic name that instantly summarises this album.
Eric’s take on Blues-Rock is so muscular you suspect an overdose of steroids. It’s Blues that’s bloody, bruised and battered, low –slung and dirty, masculine and uncomplicated. Eric’s vocal chords have been stitched together from the shredded bits that Joe Cocker and Bruce Springsteen have coughed up between them over the last 40 years. It ain’t pretty but it’s as fitting a voice as any working man can hope to employ to tell straight stories that hide no meaning, have no side nor suggest hidden depths. This is as basic as music and lyrics can be; he even has a song called “Steak and Potatoes”.
And this back to basics works, particularly on ‘White Man’, a song that reminds me of very old ZZ Top, when they still played that unpolished riffing Blues before the MTV makeover. Eric has red Indian blood in him and makes the Blues sound primeval and instinctive, like something that’s begrudgingly hauled itself from the swamp in ‘Southern Comfort’ or from the man-made reservoir at the end of ‘Deliverance’; unfortunately it’s also dragged out a few unsavoury things as well, things that should have been long forgotten and left for dead. Eric has a song called ‘Should Have Been Dead’.
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Eric tells it like it is. This album came as an epiphany and a rescue from something unpalatable that was eating into him. He thanks many people for helping him answer the call and especially his daughter. As he says in the sleeve notes: “I never knew but a little girl is in my heart”. That one explanatory note is a show-stopper: a sentimental declaration from a man who through his music and words could never be mistaken for anything but a man in all the traditional male senses of the word.
On one level this music is unexceptional, being just another rocking Blues album. On another level and in the context of Eric's honesty and openness it’s revelatory in the palpable depth of the personal catharsis the album represents and evokes.
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