Barroom blues usually goes one of two ways: An album with a bunch of ba-DA ba-DA songs on it and a few harmless, slow ballads thrown in for good measure, or jams the listener can get lost in–air drumming and head bobbing ’till the heart’s content. The Stone Foxes is the latter. But with a few harmless, slow ballads thrown in for good measure. “Patience,” “I Killed Robert Johnson,” and 
“Young Man,” by themselves, make up for any redundancy or weakness on the album (such as the tepid “Easy” and the by-the-numbers cover of “Little Red Rooster”). And then there’s songs like “Hyde & Pine,” a great blues-punk number, that take the album even further down the road from mediocrity and towards really solid, garage rock. I can’t help but assume that, live, this band blows the doors off. Another thing that keeps the album interesting is the bandmembers’ differing vocal styles, ranging from classic rock to Jet-like pseudo classic rock, and rough blues. This band impressed me with their debut, and “Bears and Bulls” proves that they weren’t a one-record-only group.
