Susan Tedeschi has described Future Soul as being “a bit more punk” than the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s usual sound. Still, the Sex Pistols and the Circle Jerks won’t be freeing up space on their relative tour buses any time soon; Tedeschi Trucks Band’s sixth studio album is as far from bondage trousers and excess phlegm as it’s possible to imagine.
Following 2022’s lunar-themed quadruple album set I Am The Moon, Tedeschi Trucks Band are more concise this time round, but the aspirations are the same: transcendence, beauty, musical communion, all achieved via a 12-piece band whose size only amplifies the restraint with which the music is performed.
This album floats. Who Am I sums it up best. A new baby sister for 2011’s gorgeous Midnight In Harlem, it gently drifts into being, lilting guitar nestling beneath a typically earthy vocal from Tedeschi, before Derek Trucks’s delicate but dominant guitar playing sweeps the song skywards.
Such is the genius of Trucks’s playing that he can convey more in a single moment than some guitarists achieve in a lifetime of playing. At the 1:55 mark in What In The World, he plays one note, then quickly hits another before sliding the resultant chord down to create an effect that’s somehow like being bathed in molasses. It sounds warm, and weirdly miraculous, and beyond the ken of most guitarists, and it’s over in little more than a second. One might be tempted to rewind immediately, but he repeats the trick five seconds later
The ‘punk’ vibe really only manifests on Hero, which starts off gently enough but is raising demons by the time the chorus swings into view, and a mid-song pause only prefaces a climax in which guitars howl and burn. Under The Knife, meanwhile, sounds like T. Rex if Marc Bolan had recorded at Muscle Shoals with a horn section, and Dan Auerbach at the controls, while the joyful I Got You could have been piped in from a Delaney & Bonnie session in 1970.
Weirdly, the front cover of Future Soul portrays Trucks and Tedeschi as superheroes, striding purposefully through a neon future landscape, guitars at the ready. It might be a playful reference to the pair’s reputation as the blues’ great power couple, but they’ve moved so far beyond that now. Future Soul is sublime, and one of America’s great bands just got a little bit greater.
