Hurst

I don't know if I've mentioned that I'm a huge Collective Soul fan, but I am.  They were that first band I got into, and even though part of me recognizes that there are better bands out there, I will never change the radio station when "Shine" comes on.

There's being a Collective Soul fan, though, and being a Collective Soul fan.  When Ross Childress quit the band in 2001, I was heartbroken thinking they'd broken up.  I've seen the band twice since, and the new guitarist is great, but he ain't Ross.  But then, a couple of years ago, I found a website for a project called Early Moses, with Ross as the guitarist.  Nothing ever seemed to materialize, but a couple of years later (still a few years ago - I'm trying to sum up like eight years of backstory here) I tracked it back to an album called Hurst.

Hurst, it turns out, is Trevor Hurst, singer for Canadian alt-rock band Econoline Crush.  I'd never heard of them.  But he was the singer for the project with Ross Childress, and they put out a seven song EP.  I own this EP.  I think that alone gives me more obscure-album points than owning either a Treepeople album, or Metal Machine Music.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, but the album is really good.  (For super fans, some of the songs off of Childress's new project Starfish and Coffee's album started on the Hurst EP).  It's not terribly groundbreaking, and the lyrics are too vague to really mean anything, but Trevor Hurst has a real presence as a singer, and a song like "Tin Cup" or "Clear Blue" work basically on sheer personality.  That, and the guitar work.  The reason I loved Ross in Collective Soul was for the guitar arrangements he came up with sometimes - he wasn't always a flashy guitarist, but he had a talent for layered parts that could be pretty stunning (think "Tremble for my Beloved").  He makes his guitar sound like a string section on "Clear Blue", and on "Not Broken" he gets to pull out all the stops just before the chorus.

The album is pretty good, all round, and I'd recommend it to any Fuel fan, for example, but I think Econoline Crush is a band unknown enough in the US that not many copies of their singer's side project are going to exist.  But on the plus side, I have a new band to check out.