Pebbleman (Heavy Blues-Rock, Hard Rock, South Africa)

Pebbleman is really the brainchild of guitarist Richard Pryor who is one of the few South African players with an endorsement from Fender. Kevin Gibson and Rob Stemett are still holding down the drums and bass respectively while Jesse Jordan growls and wails over the top of it all.

Pryor grew up listening to bands like Deep Purple. Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath, which you can clearly hear in the heavy hard rock edge of this album. He no doubt has the rock guitar chops to back everything up. However, don’t think that this is just a hard rock fret board arpeggio exercise. He lists SRV, Gary Moore and Joe Bonamassa as some of his influences and has spent years playing and still does with the band Boulevard Blues which is straight up blues rock.

This is a full throttle old school rock ride with a nitrous shot of metal and some blues guitar screaming at the limits of traction the whole way to the end of the strip. The old school ’70s rock bands like Whitesnake and Led Zeppelin had deep roots in the blues and were really modern interpretations or you could say they were even an evolution of the blues for their time.