Best-selling Australian singer-songwriter Xavier Rudd is set to release his seventh album, Dark Shades of Blue, on August 19th. Confirmed appearances at the Jazz Aspen Snowmass and Bumbershoot festivals in August and the Austin City Limits festival in September will bookend a headlining tour that will find Xav bringing his world-renowned live performance to cities across the U.S.
Dark Shades of Blue is dusky and cool, more sober than any work Rudd has ever done, though don’t mistake it for temperate. Guitar-driven jams expand on a sound only hinted at on previous releases, and distortion often supplants the pretty jangly guitars heard on earlier work. Mixed by Joe Barresi (Tool, Queens of the Stone Age), Dark Shades of Blue shows Rudd at his most assertive, heavy and psychedelic, and while Xav’s signature didgeridoo remains, along with the myriad of instruments and voices featured on other records, the results are less ‘world music’ than they are the makings of a truly global record.
