Band:	Redroad Crossing
Album:	Medicine Man
Style:	Rock, Blues rock
Release date:	2008
A review by:	Jeff

01. Medicine Man
02. Give Me a Chance
03. Red Road
04. The Sweat Lodge
05. Riding The Buffalo
06. Reservation Land
07. F.B.I (Full Blood Indian)
08. Badlands
09. Sudancing In Paradise
10. Welcome In a New World
11. Heyoka Song (The Contrarie)
12. The Vision And The Dream
13. Spirit Of The Red Man

Redroad Crossing is the project of two French guys: Laurent Brun Laferrere a singer who is passionate by North America Indians and Thierry Sorondo who was the lead guitarist of High Power a really good French band of the 80's. "Medicine Man" is the first album of the project and if this album features some good songs and good ideas, it suffers also of a terrible production. We're in 2008, I don't understand how it can be possible to produce an album like this one.

I addition of the bad production, the main problem of "Medicine Man" is that we really don't know if the band wants to play Southern bluesy Rock or Industrial stuff. We don't have any drums here and only electronic sounds and strangely the sound is so bad that it sounds like some industrial music. It could be ok but I don't think that it fits pretty well with the main topic of the album, North American Indians and nature. Plus even if it's not labelled as an "old school" music band, the songs are really "old" in the spirit and I doubt that it will be attractive for the young metalheads? Despite this problem, "Medicine Man" has good songs like "Riding The Buffalo" and definitely Thierry Sorondo still knows how to play amazing guitars soli like on the track "Red Road".

As you know the problem of "Medicine Man" is its production. This is simply one of the worst productions that I had to listen to lately. The sound always has some kind of noise on it, the guitars sound "old", the voice of Laurent Brun Laferrere, who is a good singer by the way but who should try to be a bit more natural too, has an ugly reverb on it? It simply kills the album because after ten minutes this is simply impossible to listen to "Medicine Man", this is so terrible! The funny part of the story is that this crapy sound simply turns "Medicine Man", an album of Southern Rock, into an Indus Metal release! Crazy isn't it? I don't know if it was the wish of the musicians but it's really "special"! No really musically speaking the first album of Redroad Crossing could be a good release, the songs are good in general but damn what a miserable production?

Unfortunately for Redroad Crossing, the production of their first album will afraid the people who could be interested by the album. That's a bit sad because "Medicine Man" is not a bad release but on the other hand it's not so hard to have good sound, even with an home studio so? You know what to do now, listen to the album if you want but be aware that a feeling of frustration will in your mind during the whole listening?