Discover Alabama powerhouses St Paul and the Broken Bones!

There are very few objective truths in life and I can’t attempt to give one about the meaning of life, or the existence of God, but there is one that I can say with absolute impunity. No song ever has been made worse by the addition of a brass section. 

St Paul and the Broken Bones seem to have been living by this since 2011, swaggering from low-lit streets in New Orleans to glittering speakeasies with little but a trombone and some cigarette stained vocals. Or at least this is what I like to believe, really they have five albums and opened for The Stones, but you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d only find them in an alleyway after dusk. 

'Sitting in the corner', their latest single, is no deviation from this, soulful and funky, bursting with the colour of a freshly ripened fruit. There is a lightness, a wooziness about it, a headrush from inhaling the fumes of whatever bar singer Paul Janeway found himself writing it in.

He mixes gospel-like vocals with a gritty saxophone, evoking a 40s jazz bar, seductive, addictive and deeply harrowing. The experience is transformative, spiritual even, so perhaps we do have answers for the meaning of life, even if it is through the medium of a brass section.