The Stone Foxes find their own way in

“I killed Robert Johnson with strychnine.” It’s a clever first-person accounting of the vaunted blues man’s death at the hands of a cuckold who slipped the singer a bad bottle of whiskey on the sly in 1938. Every blues-rocker in the business worships at this musty altar, but not ever, to my knowledge, from this perspective. Cheers to the Stone Foxes for finding their own way in. This is a San Francisco–based blues-rock band within their first decade of life, and they’ve already figured a lot of things out, like how to make records that sound the way they sound live: beefy, imperfect, and erupting with energy.

The Stone Foxes are for when you just want to hear a band that puts everything in the right place. So much of their sound was invented in the garages of San Francisco in the 1960s that it would be a mistake to leave that out. If you’re old enough, you’ll hear architecture that spans the distance all the way back to Blue Cheer and Big Brother and the Holding Company, but, through the fresh lenses of youth.

Do the Stone Foxes ever fall flat? Yes, occasionally, when they perform past the whiteness of their own blues experience. Lost is the prime element of sex. All but Janis Joplin managed to expunge the fertility of our Delta forebears from the body of electric guitar–driven blues on record from the late ’60s and ’70s. But who cares? I’ve grown weary of the blues sycophants among us who take themselves too seriously. The Stone Foxes are way more fun, a moody and hard-hitting rock quintet with the guts to do their own thing and the immaturity to not care too much one way or the other. USA Today loved the Stone Foxes’ version of “The Hangman,” and for once, I find myself unable to disagree with their music critic.