Kris Barras Band - Live Review

Kris Barras Band @ Rock City, Nottingham - 21/06/18

Thursday night in the Rock City Basement, and the place was bustling. With a laid back and friendly atmosphere this felt like an inclusive community of a crowd. Kris Barras is dubbed the UK’s most exciting Blues Rock guitarist, and with the anticipation in the crowd, you’d believe it. Yet, even with this title Kris and the band are still relatively unknown,  so we headed down to check out if they put on much of a show.

Building anticipation by playing classic rock banger after banger, the band casually stepped onto the stage picked up their instruments and began to play. The crowd were in from the get go. The passion and the authenticity of this unit is palpable. It’s quite a refreshing contradiction seeing young, cool, modern guys playing old school Blusey Rock. Finally, someone’s bringing it back! We did expect a dirtier sound, the tunes; guitar, drums, bass, keys, vocals- were all quite clean, this isn’t a negative necessarily, just an observation that this is modern, clean-cut blues rock. It stands at a slight tangent to the original blues you assume spawned this bands inspiration, which had grit, dirt, growls and distausion. 

The set was so laid back but also laiden with guts, truly a performer Kris Barras is a star, and having recently been played on BBC Radio 2, the world is surely soon to find out.