Show Me Where It Hurts – Show Me Where It Hurts

Show Me Where It Hurts play big-hearted pop songs and heavy-hearted torch songs with a light-hearted reverie. They distill 60 years of Maximum R&B through the tight and focused bottleneck of a two-piece, and they glory in the chaos which comes when you tip the bottle over. There’s a sweetness to these songs of love, loss, hope and heartache – an immersion in the darkness, at least in the knowledge (to paraphrase Leonard Cohen) that there’ll always be some cracks to let the light in. ‘Show me where it hurts’, they sing, ‘and I’ll take the pain away in a kiss’.

Following the release of their Roundhead recorded, self-titled 7” single, the duo immersed themselves in the completion of a new release, recording with Edmund McWilliams (Bressa Creeting Cake) and mixing with Olly Harmer at The Lab. Cherrypicking a handful of their tastiest tracks from sessions ahead of an impending, full-length LP release, the extended, eponymous self-titled EP is a sweet, swinging, satisfying piece of work, distilling four years of songwriting, arranging and performing into a thirty-minute rumination on matters of the heart and the head, compelling in its sounds, its themes and in its tunes, of which there are an abundance.

Building on the one-two punch of the drums/Rhodes combination, the duo added harmonies, guitars, percussion and keys to the mix and recruited players such as Salon Kingsadore’s Hayden Sinclair on bass, Tom Rodwell (‘Sheffield’s an­swer to Lightnin’ Hopkins’: NME) on guitar, legendary double bassist Peter Scott, Auckland wunderkind Finn Scholes (Carnivorous Plant Society) on trumpet, and the great Cam Allen on baritone sax, to augment masterfully their appealing, unique and soulful sound and vision. Swingin’ sass and soul, and fingerpoppin’ rock-a-rolla! With a hands-on-hips line on the groove, Show Me Where It Hurts gonna make you wanna move!