Randy Newman without the sexual charisma.

Taking the pitch-dark hill country side of The Whiskey Shambles “ultra-blues” sound and stripping it to its primal essence, the music of The Whiskey Shambles Duo is the Shambles sound at its most naked. Often featuring little more than bare-bones acoustic guitar and primitive percussion for accompaniment, The Duo’s music pushes to the foreground the juxtaposition of, and interplay between, Nathan Singer’s baritone growl and LaTanya Foster’s soaring lilt, which is at once both earthy and ethereal. Whereas the full Whiskey Shambles band is often raucous and belligerent, bringing slashing, distorted riffs and thumping low end to the blues, The Whiskey Shambles Duo is more haunting and atmospheric, more atavistic, summoning up the ghosts of blues past, before it was the blues – a moan through the trees and swamps, wailing heartbreak, revenge, and revolution.