By John Kereiff Features – Music Reviews & Get Off My Lawn!
Randy Lee Riviere is a blues artist in the same way that ZZ Top, an admitted influence, is. Randy is also a wildlife biologist, and that’s at the heart of Concrete Blues. Produced by Tom Hambridge this disc is a rockin’ set of thought provoking songs about the world around us.
Riviere mostly considers himself a country boy but took to rock & roll at an early age, citing ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres as being particularly influential. He splits his time between Nashville and a Montana farm and has been involved in large-scale efforts in the past to protect and restore important elements of the Native American landscape. Perhaps the intent of Concrete Blues can be best explained in the title song. “Let’s look at California” he says. “There are over 1300 dams in the state. In some cases ALL the water in these watersheds has been taken for metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles and huge scale monocultural agriculture, (yet) rivers and streams provide some of the most diverse and important wildlife habitats on this planet.”