Bob Andrews & RKR-CB "Invisible Love" (4.5*)

While I haven’t lined up for a copy of the book that accompanies this latest episode of doggy derring-doo on the strength of the music herein I’ll be grabbing the musical component of subsequent releases as soon as I’m aware they’re out there. The second episode follows five months after the first, and there is, by all accounts, significant progress (including titles) for a third and fourth title in the developing series.

Like Shotgun, what we’re looking at here is part of an ongoing concept blending photography in and around the Marigny and Bywater neighbourhoods of New Orleans and a story line involving two black Labradors (Guzzard and Mr. Poo) with sequential sets of lyrics from RKR-CB (lyricist/producer Robin Hunn) set to music and performed by Andrews and a select cast of New Orleans musos, including Alex McMurray (guitar) and his Royal Fingerbowl confederates Carlo Nuccio (guitar, drums) and Matt Perrine (bass, tuba) and slide guitar from John Mooney. Andrews contributes vocals, keyboards and guitar and there’s a bit of extra work around the drum kit from Jermal Watson, plus saxophone action from Derek Huston.

John Mooney’s slide guitar drives Invisible Love into Exile on Main Street Stones territory, and things stay in the same postcode for Don't Stop. She Drives Me To Drink could probably use a dash more bravado and a a bit of Graham Parker sneer, but that wouldn’t have worked on DeFleured Me where the joys of pleasure are measured against the consequences. Where You Gonna Go has some rather classy piano work as Andrews ponders the question and Robin Hunn steps up to the vocal booth for a sleazy Bone, five and a bit minutes of leaving very little to the imagination.

There’s a tasty slide solo and a fair chunk of Sea Cruise in Beat Up The Memories, a brass section providing the punctuation on Suck My Pipes and a distinctly canine vibe (as you’d expect from the title) to Mutt Not Smut. Pretty In My Dreams takes a look at the gap between self image and external reality, Dynamite Doll rocks along in fine Jerry Lee Lewis fashion and Third Line My Heart has the brass section back to the fore as Andrews works New Orleans parade territory. It’s an upbeat and uplifting way to wrap up proceedings.

Invisible Love mightn’t be the destination you’re seeking if you’re after something flashy and spectacular, but if you’re after a fairly classy meld of New Orleans R&B and vintage rock’n’roll you could do much, much worse. When’s the next instalment?

Peter Stampfel & The Ether Frolic Mob "The Sound of America" (4*)

As the latest in a long line of interestingly-monikered outfits from MacGrundy’s Old-Timey Wool Thumpers in 1960 down on New York’s Lower East Side, through the Strict Temperance String Band of Lower Delancy Street into various incarnations of the Holy and Unholy Modal Rounders, The Ether Frolic Mob (originally Velocity Ramblers) date from around 2004, with a shifting lineup, since everyone, as Stampfel points out in the liner notes, has day jobs and/or other bands.

In a similarly lengthy line of descent Ether Frolics apparently date back to the middle of the eighteenth century, and originally referred to the recreational use of the anaesthetic gas by  well-to-do revellers and medical students, developing into entertainments where a troupe of performers fuelled their activities with the gas and invited members of the audience to join in the revelry. Such events continued into the Jazz Age, and one notes the presence of ether among the additives that fuelled Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. They were, in Stampfel’s description, Sort of an old-timey acid test.

And although the twenty-first century The Ether Frolic Mob, don’t indulge, that old-timey acid test is probably the right label to apply to this particular variant on the genre that has come to be known as Freak Folk. Stampfel describes the entity known as The Ether Frolic Mob as the culmination of over a half-century of thinking about my ideal of a musical group, even though the thinking, itself, will never culminate, a collection of people across a range of age groups he enjoys playing and hanging with, all of whom contribute vocally and bring a wide variety of angles and attitudes into the mix.

The Sound of America comprises a selection of eighteen tracks out of at least twenty-five cut over two days  at the Jalopy theatre in Red Hook, Brooklyn in the summer of 2011. From the opener, Great Day, a track originally recorded by Bing Crosby and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in the early thirties, with slight modifications by Stampfel to the unlikely closer (I Will Survive, the seventies disco track reworked so it’s of a piece with everything in between) we’ve got a collection that sits right in Old Weird/Freak Folk territory, with a prime example being the traditional Jawbone, which they hadn’t planned on recording, but someone went into it, everybody joined in and it took a second take to nail it. Old Weird/Freak Folk works like that. Drunken Banjo Waltz started its existence as an instrumental, needed a title, and once that arrived the words didn’t take that much longer.

The four volumes of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music are a prime source for OWFF, and a prime link to what Greil Marcus has termed the Old Weird America, so it’s no surprise to see some of the contents turn up hereabouts, including Train on the Island, which gets a bit of padding with verses borrowed from elsewhere and a couple made up by Stampfel. Charlie Patton’s Shake It Break it doesn’t turn up in the Anthology, but it does here, a good timey slice of raunchy ruckus, and Wild Wagoner, the second selection from the Anthology, gets a slower treatment than the original because Stampfel can’t play fiddle that fast and, anyway, he prefers ‘em done slower so you can appreciate the melody. Last Chance started off  as a Hobart Smith instrumental, though Stampfel decided it needed some words, and duly provided same.

Playwright, actor and director Sam Shepard at one stage played drums for the Holy Modal Rounders and contributed the tune for Back Again (a co-rewrite that started as an instrumental from an old recording with banjo-playing son Walker, words by Stampfel). The son’s no slouch on the banjo, and at the age of seventeen with just seven months experience under his belt, according to Stampfel, could do stuff on it I couldn’t, after going at it for about fifty years, and singing like an old Southern mountain guy from a hundred years ago. That’s Stampfel doing the vocal here, though, sounding like something from the nineteenth century though there’s a contemporary edge to the lyrics with references to falling off the wagon and such. LIstening to the tune there’s a fair bit in common with the one Robin Williamson appropriated for the Incredible String Band’s Log Cabin Home in the Sky...

Things are in much more authentic old time territory for Golden Slippers, straight out of the blackface minstrel era, and then we come to the genuinely odd Shombolar, originally recorded by Sheriff and the Ravels in December 1958, and, according to Stampfel the Rosetta Stone connecting African music, Caribbean music, and doo-wop.

There’s a fair dash of old time jug band about Gonna Make Me and the good time music continues through Hey-O, Memphis Shakedown and New Fortune Fortune, a couple of prime examples of cuica-driven Old Weird Freak Folk. Comes Around embraces the principle that a melody cannot be too simple, or too stupid, or too stupidly simple and Deep in the Heart of Texas might seem to fit the same bill, but features new words from John Morthland.

The Harry Smith Anthology provides Blind Uncle Gaspard’s La Dansuese and Stampfel’s intention to record a song for every year of the twentieth century provides I Will Survive, which might seem like a surprising choice or 1979  but has, in Stampfel’s own words Really nice chords, and it’s fun to sing.

Old Weird/Freak Folk (OWFF) is Stampfel’s term for what’s on offer here, and the contents may or may not actually fit under generic classifications, though Stampfel’s descriptors of the stye add a bit of clarification to what you can expect from his current projects.

OWFF tends to be multi-generational and generationally inclusive, as opposed to that just-for-the-young or just-for-the-hip exclusivity common to other genres and the instrumental breaks lean towards soloing amidst ensemble improvisation (tail-gating in traditional New Orleans jazz) as opposed to the Everybody-take-turns-and-show-off solo aesthetic you tend to find in bluegrass and jazz with, in Stampfel’s words an ever-increasing possibility of neat weird shit happening.

Your mileage will, of course, vary, depending on your tolerance of one man’s neat weird shit. Approach with caution, but definitely worth investigating if those descriptors sound like the sort of thing that floats your boat. Definitely works for me...

Graham Parker & The Rumour "Three Chords Good" (4.5*)

The cynics among us would probably be inclined to ascribe the reunion of Graham Parker and his original band the Rumour for the first time in thirty-one years to pecuniary mercenary motives but it seems we’re looking at a rather remarkable slice of serendipity.

Parker has worked, on and off, with various members of his old band over the years, presumably on the basis of what felt right and who was available at that particular time, and with Three Chords Good’s dozen tracks written Parker apparently decided bassist Andrew Bodnar and drummer Steve Goulding would be really something as the rhythm section on the new album. Goulding suggested bringing guitarists Brinsley Schwarz and Martin Belmont and keyboard ace Bob Andrews aboard as well and without any prior planning there’s a full-blown Graham Parker & The Rumour reunion.

That was May 2011, and the recording, produced by Parker and Dave Cook and cut in upstate New York was finished by August. At that point, movie writer/director/producer Judd Apatow turned up on Parker’s doorstep with the offer of a role in his new film, This Is 40, a comedy that updates the story of the duo from 2007‘s Knocked Up and features Parker, cast as himself, performing in a duo and with the Rumour.

The sessions for Three Chords Good and their spell on the set of This Is 40 also provide also provide a dramatic climax for the Gramaglia Brothers’ (End Of The Century: The Story Of The Ramones) feature-length documentary Don’t Ask Me Questions, a profile of Parker’s career that’s been ten years in the making.

It’s been twenty years since Parker recorded for a major label, but he’s spent the intervening period in DIY cottage industry mode, releasing a string of albums and official bootlegs and a book of short fiction (Carp Fishing on Valium) all of which feature the man’s pissed-off snarl and cynical attitude, which comes straight into play on the opening track here.

Snake Oil Capital Of The World appropriates the intro to Hey Lord, Don’t Ask Me Questions, arguably Parker’s best known track, and pursues that loping reggae-derived groove through a fittingly trenchant diagnosis of what’s going down in twenty-first century America, pointing out that the old, weird America (the one of medicine shows, snake oil salesmen, carnival barkers and opportunistic carpetbaggers) never went anywhere.

It’s the sort of thing that would have had the younger Parker seething, but as he points out on the following track the thirty-plus years since he came to prominence have been a Long Emotional Ride (Maybe I’m just getting old or something/But something broke down my resistance) so despite the fact that he sees snake oil everywhere he realises there isn’t a whole lot he can do about it.

Long Emotional Ride has a fair dose of the confessional about it as Parker looks back on his career and notes recently acquired wisdom with a degree of wistfulness and a rough-hewn tenderness that runs on into Stop Cryin’ About The Rain. The totally self-explanatory She Rocks Me works a snappy semi-skiffle groove while Three Chords Good would have fitted comfortably on any of those earlier GP&R albums. There’s a touch of Mose Allison to leaven the Van Morrison influences on the slower, moody Old Soul, a track that swings sensuously with Bob Andrews’ Hammond B-3 organ to the fore (as it is throughout).

Andrews is there again on A Lie Gets Halfway ‘Round The World, a track that shows Parker can still rant with the best of them, Mercury Poisoning revisited while he takes aim at the music industry and the mainstream media again. There’s a touch of the doo-wops and Sam Cooke about That Moon Was Low and we’re into boppier territory for Live In Shadows before the trio of tracks that take the album out with a definite bang.

America’s role in Afghanistan and the apathy that has come as the conflict grinds on gets the once-over in Arlington’s Busy (And Arlington's busy and business is brisk, not that you'd notice ‘cos ignorance is bliss) a bristling track that decries lying military officers and politicians in a measured statement of impassioned disgust. Coathangers shows whose side of the abortion debate he’s on and manages to rock out while it does so, and Last Bookstore In Town delivers a wry commentary on the decline of small town niche businesses.

The Parker who emerged from obscurity and a string of dead end jobs in the Channel Islands, Chichester and Gibraltar and a hippy band that gigged in a Moroccan night club was in many ways a reincarnation of the ’50s English Angry Young Man, articulate, antiestablishment and extremely pissed off at the world in general and his social circumstances in particular. The Rumour, a collection of pub rock veterans who’d been around the ridges long enough to know what worked and what didn’t locked right in behind him to provide a worthy antidote to the increasing blandness and orthodoxy of mid-seventies rock.

Thirty-odd years after The Up Escalator it’s good to see the combination back as a unit, with Bob Andrews behind the keyboards (he’d left before Escalator and been replaced by Nicky Hopkins and the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan). Given their circumstances over the intervening decades (Brinsley Schwarz had been working as a luthier in London, while fellow guitarist Martin Belmont was a Yorkshire librarian) you mightn’t be expecting the old fires to burn quite so bright but taste and an understanding of nuance are timeless and one suspects it’s something like learning to ride a bicycle.

Once you know how, the ability doesn’t desert you.

Parker’s lyrics still bite and there’s a hint of the old snarl, though the anger’s tempered by a curmudgeonly resignation, Andrews’ keyboards weave their way through the melodies, the guitars add crunch and the supple rhythm section sets things up just right.

The result is an album that hearkens back to a pretty damn glorious past, delivers a continuation of the old vibe into the present and leaves this long time fan hoping for more of the same in the future.

That may end up being a case of living in hope and dying in frustration but, in the meantime, at least I’ve got Three Chords Good, a reinvigorated interest in past glories and an inclination to catch ip on what I’ve missed in the interim.

The Hot 8 Brass Band "The Life And Times Of…" (4.5*)

Five years on from the rerelease of their debut album on the British Tru Thoughts label, the second recording from New Orleans Hot 8 Brass Band (the third if you count their contribution to The Blind Boys of Alabama Down In New Orleans in 2008) continues the Hot 8 tradition of recasting New Orleans marching music by filtering more contemporary material through a second line sensibility.

Last time around it was Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing and Snoop Dogg’s What’s My Name? This time Basement Jaxx’s Bingo Bango and The Specials’ Ghost Town get the Hot 8 treatment but from the opening of Steaming Blues it’s obvious we’re still looking back at the same roots, hot straight-ahead New Orleans jazz, with the writing credit going to former Hot 8 member Joseph Williams, whose death at the hands of the New Orleans Police Department is the subject examined a few tracks later on Can’t Hide From The Truth. The tuba growls, the horns blaze and the hollers and percussion deliver a sound that’s a 100% New Orleans fusion of traditional jazz, Afro Cuban, brass band and funk elements.

It would have been easy to do a Trombone Shorty (not that I’m knocking Trombone Shorty, just pointing out a difference in approach) to have headed into and Heavy Friends territory, rousing up guests but no, the Hot 8 work much the same territory as their debut, and you won’t find a featuring in the track listing.

There’s a fine funky tuba and snare drum driven start to Fine Tuner, a percussive groove with call-and-response vocals that builds gradually to a joyous fusion of parade music, R&B and old-fashioned swing. Basement Jaxx's Bingo Bango gets a Latin-tinged makeover, blending Afro-Cuban and New Orleans elements, jazz and funk influences and braying horns into a joyous salsa before a rap intro runs into New Orleans (After The City), a gospel-derived hip-hop assertion that, basically, there’s no place like home and home is where the Hot 8 want to be. At the same time things aren’t all rosy on the home turf.

New Orleans police shot and killed band member Joseph Williams and Can’t Hide From The Truth castigates the culprits and those who know what went down. Anger and bitterness run deep, and not without reason, though the truth will set you free. Sure, there’s hurt and bitterness in there, and it comes out in the music, but there’s also a solid New Orleans second line vibe as the drums rattle and the horns deliver a message that’s equal parts protest, tribute and call to celebration. It’s a potent blend of seemingly contradictory emotions.

Given some of the redevelopment issues that formed one of the major plot lines for the Treme TV series, you’d possibly have thought someone would have picked up on the idea that The Specials’ Ghost Town is a rather obvious fit for post-Katrina New Orleans, The Hot 8 shift it firmly into the casbah with a Moroccan intro that has virtually nothing to do with conventional N’Awlins notions but works just fine anyway when they start ragging on the theme and bring it back home.

Issues with heroin come up in Let Me Do My Thing as Hot 8 trombonist Tyrus Chapman addresses the war on drugs in a righteous spray that blends elements of soul, jazz, hip hop and reggae, but the rap towards the end might tempt the rap-averse listener to press the shuffle button. In my case the sentiments are sufficiently righteous to avert that, but mileages may vary.

The shuffle button will almost invariably come into action if it’s within reach when Skit comes around, not that I’ve got anything against a band shooting the breeze in the studio, you understand, but there are some things that fit into the programming but don’t necessarily float your boat when you remove them from that context.

The context, however, is fairly obvious when you get to War Time, a blast of infectiously catchy, percussive sound, with blaring horns, snappy drums, whoops, hollers and handclaps in a fusion of traditional jazz, parade music, R&B, funk and Afro-Cuban elements that winds things up in the best way possible, leaving the listener looking for more.

The Life and Times Of ... delivers nine slices of prime twenty-first century New Orleans music that couldn’t be cut any way other than live in the studio, with a definite sense of community that invokes a tradition of marching band music that stretches back well over a century to the pre-jazz era. The Hot 8 matches a brassy blast of joyous grooves with Dixieland, jazz, R&B, rock, funk, Afro Cuban and hip-hop elements to produce something that’s simultaneously contemporary and traditional, a great expression of second line fonk.

It is, according to reports, half of a pigeon pair of albums, with the sequel apparently intended as a more reflective tribute to fallen friends delivered through a collection of traditional brass band material. That’s a prospect I’m looking forward to with considerable anticipation, though Tombstone, due 20 May doesn’t, judging by the track listing (there isn’t too much that’s recognisable about the names, anyway) doesn’t seem to be too traditional.

The preorder will, however, be going in regardless...

The Hot 8 Brass Band "Rock with The Hot 8 Brass Band" (4.5*)

Right from the start of What's My Name (Rock With The Hot 8), six and a half minutes of marching band mayhem (check the interjections, this mother must have been cut live in the studio) it’s obvious there’s something that kicks serious ass looming.

While there’ll be elements in this blend of marching brass, traditional New Orleans jazz, Crescent City funk, old style soul and contemporary hip hop beats that won’t be to everyone’s taste, it’s a case of the whole being more than the sum of the parts and there’s the old shuffle button if there’s something that doesn’t quite cut it as far as you’re concerned.

Take, for example, the start to Joseph Williams’ It's Real. You mightn’t like the generic sounding starting rap, but once the brass kicks in there’s no doubt where you are and it’s of a piece with the opening track which is, I gather a cover of a Snoop Dogg number. Click on the shuffle button when the rap comes back in and you’ll miss the exuberant ending that runs nicely into the traditional Fly Away, where the vocal fits comfortably into the song’s gospel roots as the band whoop and holler in the background.

I Got You kicks off in R&B territory before the brass steps in, and you can say much the same about the cover of Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing, close to nine minutes of unadulterated fonk complete with an uptempo a capella run through the lyric line (assuming a capella allows handclaps).  The band’s Keith Anderson contributes Jisten To Me, while We Are One is an R&B cover dating back to the early eighties. Both are delivered with the same exuberant verve that runs through the rest of the album, as is the group composition Skeet Skeet, and you don’t need to be Einstein to identify the reggae roots of Rastafunk, credited to Hot 8 member Joseph Williams, shot dead by police in controversial circumstances in 2004.

E Flat Blues sits firmly in traditional territory, and will be working its way up towards Hughesy’s Top 1500 most played, which is more than be said for Ziggly Wiggly’s Skit # 1, a forty second denunciation of tight-fisted parade organisers who fail to cough up for the band. I can sympathise, but it’s going to attract the shuffle button on a regular basis, specifically because it precedes a great Love Don't Live Here, which demonstrates what the Hot 8 are capable of doing to a late seventies chart topper. Finally, Get Up (credited to Hot 8 snare drummer Dinerral Shavers, fatally wounded while driving with his family in 2006) winds things up in suitably upbeat fashion as the band rags, the handclaps, whoops and hollers continue and the second line rhythms run on for close to seven minutes.

Rock with The Hot 8 does a rather wonderful job of delivering a brass band that’s definitely contemporary, and while the hip-hop elements are something I could probably do without taking them out of the mix would detract from what is a very impressive restatement of New Orleans tradition in a twenty-first century setting. If you’re looking to deliver traditional styles to new audiences this, I reckon, is the way to do it.

Neil Young with Crazy Horse "Psychedelic Pill" (4.5*)

There's a pair of chicken and the egg statements that spring to mind when you're looking at something like the Neil Young with Crazy Horse album they've decided to label Psychedelic Pill.

Which came first?

Did consumers stop listening to albums all the way through in sequence because artists have stopped making grand artistic statements that hang together seamlessly?

Or did artists stop making grand artistic statements that hang together seamlessly because listeners stopped listening to albums all the way through?

Anyone who's read Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace will have no doubt about where Neil stands on the matter. We're supposed to listen all the way through, which is fine up to a point, and that point comes when you decide there are things hereabouts that justify employing the old shuffle button.

Actually, when it comes to recent Neil activities you probably need to link Waging Heavy Peace, Americana and Psychedelic Pill because they're all part of the same process. Different aspects of that process, but they're definitely interlinked. The book, of course, came first, and we've already had a look at Americana here, but now it's time to look at Psychedelic Pill and we need to think about the links a bit.

Looking at Americana, I remarked: Regardless of how prolific you are, sitting down to write a book (Waging Heavy Peace, apparently semi-autobiographical, due out later this year) the effort’s possibly going to steer you away from writing songs and while you’re thinking about the past you’re going to remember things you were doing back when you were starting out in the early sixties.

There's an additional factor revealed in the pages of Waging Heavy Peace which appears to have some bearing on Psychedelic Pill. The book, Americana and the new album are all the work of a clean and sober Young who's eschewed the use of marijuana and alcohol, apparently on medical advice.

You might be inclined to question whether this matters at all, and for most of us it probably doesn't. As far as Neil's concerned it probably doesn't either, but where these things are mentioned in the book he's not sure about song writing without the altered consciousness or chemical enhancement because it's been a while since he's written a song.

So we seem to have a book in the process, and the process had reached a point where he could switch his focus towards different projects, which seems to have been the point where he started thinking in terms of Crazy Horse again. With the Horse back in the stable they need something new to play, and the WHP manuscript has had Neil thinking back to his days on the road across the prairies with his early band (The Squires). You're thinking about that stuff, you need something to work on with the Horse, so you head back to that material. Fine. There's a certain amount of logic there.

With Americana in the can the songs apparently start to flow, and that delivered most of the material here. Given the fact that Neil had a number of matters that were occupying his attention you're hardly going to be surprised to see them turn up again.

We're talking about a man who'll wander away from his tour bus, as described at the beginning of Nick Kent's article Neil Young and the Haphazard Highway, leaving instructions to the driver to pick him up a few miles down the road, visualise something that fits the vibe of the landscape he's walking through and turn it into something anthemic in the genre that has currently caught his attention.


The problem, of course, lies in Neil's tendency to channel whatever vibe he's into, and proceed without the intervention of an editing force. That means if you’re into concise statements you’ll be steering clear of the opening Driftin' Back here.

Actually, if you’re into concise statements you’ll be steering clear of Waging Heavy Peace as well.

Driftin' Back is, to a large extent, symptomatic of the whole of the sprawling double CD statement, and your reaction to the track will probably define your attitude to what follows the twenty-seven and a half minutes. For a start the Hey now now, hey now now chorus makes for a substantial, and quite effective ear-worm.

I’ve been trying to get the thing out of my head for days, but, on the other hand, the grumpy old man trying to find inner tranquility while everything around him needles his consciousness gets your goat after two or three hearings. Having read WHP you know where he stands on his new format for high quality digital music and the rest of his critique of spirituality, MTV, contemporary listening habits, the degradation of sound quality in recorded music (when you hear my song you only get 5 percent, you used to get it all) and the reduction of Picasso’s art to digital wallpaper hardly comes as a surprise.

The band speeds up and slows down, ebbs and flows, locks together and drifts apart as Young scatters verses across the landscape, filling the rest of the terrain with swathes of guitar like you haven’t heard since, well, the previous NY/CH recoding.

There are two takes on Psychedelic Pill, which comes across as daughter of Cinnamon Girl, the first phased to within an inch of its life, and the second, more straightforward reading closes the double album. Apart from the CG Revisited bit, there’s a healthy serve of Dirty Old Man in there as well. Strangely, given the time differential between its 3:28 and 3:13, it doesn’t work nearly as well as the preceding half hour of Drifting Back, though the phasing definitely brings back memories...

But the marathons resume with close to seventeen minutes of roughhewn guitar on Ramada Inn, a clear-eyed and coherent not quite eulogy for a long-term relationship now that the kids have grown up and flown the nest. It’s Greendale-style storytelling, uncharacteristically focussed as Young looks at the sacrifices it takes to keep things afloat, more than a quarter of an hour of shimmering sentiment and melancholy analysis conducted in the temporary shelter of a motel room against an alcoholic background. Gut wrenching, epic, and arguably as good as anything he’s done in forty-plus years.

Born In Ontario closes the first disk with a trip down memory lane, cousin of Homegrown in much the same way that the title track reflects past glories. It’s a paean to his birthplace and his Canadian heritage while acknowledging the good fortune he’s experienced since leaving the prairies behind. It rocks along nicely, offering much needed light and shade after Ramada Inn, and if there’s a track hereabouts that’s suited to high rotation on the radio this, rather than the title track, is it.

Or maybe it’s Twisted Road‘s recount of Young’s early encounters with the music his heroes—Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison and the Grateful Dead—produced in their heyday, with Dylan’s lyrics rollin' off his tongue/Like Hank Williams chewin' bubble gum. Let’s just leave it at lightweight, shall we?

She's Always Dancing repeats Driftin’ Back’s acapella intro > thudding Horse jam treatment and seems to reprise the title track’s pill-popping bopper for around eight and a half minutes of riffing between vocal choruses. Tight harmonies, trademark Neil guitar, it’s pleasant enough, but on an album that includes something like Ramada Inn most other tracks are going to pale by comparison.

Continuing a long held Neil tradition, For The Love Of Man brings out a song that’s been around for years (as in Silver and Gold, Ordinary People and Hitchhiker) and provides a welcome change of pace with a comforting ballad and a lyric that pays tribute to Young’s severely handicapped son Ben.


Which brings us to the album’s other major set piece, the monstrous (and I use the term deliberately) Walk Like A Giant. According to film maker Johnathan Demme the central used to feel like a giant, and now I feel like a leaf floating in the stream image stems from Neil’s 2005 aneurysm, and the rest of the lyrics fit comfortably into that retrospective feel that pervades the rest of the double album, but there’s an interesting contrast between the jaunty whistled hook and Young’s raging reflection on his (sorry, our) generation’s failure to change the world, which was what we thought we were out to do some forty-five years ago.

Around ten minutes in, Young lets the giant out of the box in savage swathes of white noise lashing the landscape much, you imagine, as a deranged Tyrannosaurus Rex might have done back in the days when there were, literally, giants walking the earth, savage squalls of noise stomping across a landscape that’s 100% Crazy Horse territory.

After that, I guess, anything’s going to be a let down, so perhaps one shouldn’t be too harsh as far as Psychedelic Pill (Alternate Mix) is concerned, but if its sister seemed inconsequential wedged between Driftin’ Back and Ramada Inn, the alternate version definitely comes across as lightweight after Walk Like a Giant.

And if you do the stats, eight tracks (nine if you count the alternate mix as a separate entity) with three definite keepers (two and a half if you’re not totally besotted by the whole of Driftin’ Back) that occupy two-thirds of the ninety-odd minutes is a much better strike rate than you might have anticipated looking back over some of Neil’s recent first thought is best thought efforts.

Very much in the whatever’s occupying Neil’s mind tradition of Fork in the Road, but with added Horse.

Bob Andrews "Shotgun" (4.5*)

As someone with a long term interest in The Rumour, Graham Parker’s one-time backing band (their three albums on their own, Max, Frogs Sprouts Clogs and Krauts and Purity Of Essence occupy a significant place in Hughesy’s list of criminally underrated albums) who also worked as the Stiff Records house band I really should have done a better job of following the individual members of a mighty fine outfit over the thirty years since they broke up in 1981.

Keyboard player Bob Andrews was the first to fly the coop, splitting in 1979 and subsequently absent from Purity Of Essence and has gone on to play on over a thousand recordings with engineering and production credits for more than fifty artists, facts I was totally unaware of until a review of this album on the Burning Wood blog had me rocking over to iTunes to grab a copy.

Twenty years ago he ended up settling in New Orleans, and has, by all accounts, become a fixture in the Crescent City music scene with a regular gig at Dos Jefes Uptown Cigar Bar at 5535 Tchoupitoulas Street, frequent appearances on the local community radio station (WWOZ)and at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. He has, along the way, acted as a side man for, among others, John Mooney, Jumpin' Johnny Sansone and Marva Wright and played several gigs with Allen Toussaint.

This album, inspired by a book of the same name about the unique shotgun architecture of New Orleans, Marigny and Bywater neighborhoods, isn’t quite the New Orleans extravaganza you might expect, although it does feature its share of New Orleans identities. Apart from Hughesy’s recent new favourite Alex McMurray on guitar, and Johnny Sansone on harmonica there’s one of Jon Cleary's Absolute Monster Gentlemen (Cornell Williams) on bass, the New Orleans Blues Department’s Red Priest on guitar, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’ s Jermal Watson on drums and up and coming saxophonist Calvin Johnson. Andrews handles keyboard and vocal duties, and contributes some guitar for good measure.

So, what’s it all about?

You’re looking, believe it or not, at a musical rendering of the adventures of Guzzard and Mr. Poo, New Orleans lyricist/author and healthcare consultant Robin Hunn’s black Labradors. The illustrated book sets the song lyrics that recount two dogs’ antics beside photographs of the Marigny and Bywater neighbourhoods with additional graphic elements from Atom Davis.

Hunn, who formed a company (RKR-CB Productions) to promote New Orleans music and help musicians delivered the set of lyrics to Andrews, who came up with the tunes, and came up with the photographs. The saga of Guzzard and Mr. Poo will continue with another book/CD combo, Invisible Love, described as edgier and more adventurous

Musically, the eleven tracks deliver a tasty fusion of Andrews’ Brinsley Schwarz and The Rumour pub rock roots and New Orleans blues and funk, deliberately looking to put the musicians in places they don’t normally go.

The title track kicks things off nicely with a Brinsley Schwarz groove, which then falls comfortably into a bit of salacious funk on Man In The Man Position and additional raunch included on Put Out or Shut Up (no explanations necessary there, folks). That’s also the case with I Knew It Was Wrong But I Did It Anyway though it’s not immediately evident we’re talking canine rather than human misbehaviour. Black Alligators mines a a dirty little New Orleans groove with tasty harp from Johnny Sansone, while Local Lover, Doghouse, Entitled to Love and Hit Me With A Bus choogle along merrily. Around the Corner and Only Lovers Do wind things up nicely, and the whole exercise hangs together rather nicely even without the book which was, I must admit, a disappointment when it arrived.

While there are language advisory issues with some tracks the rest of them would have been getting high rotation if I was still presenting on the local airwaves which is, I think, about as high a recommendation as I’m able to deliver. There’s a raffish charm that runs through the album that sufficed to have the sequel Invisible Love downloaded as soon as it was sighted on the horizon.

Bob Dylan "Tempest" (4*)

Having spent a good forty-five years musing on various aspects of the cultural phenomenon formerly known as Robert Zimmerman I reckon I’ve just about got him figured out. That might seem like a big call, what with the chopping and changing that has gone on through thirty-five studio albums and fifty years of twists, turns and changes of disguise.

Given that chopping and changing the first thing you’re tempted to do when faced with a new Dylan album is to figure out where it fits into the jigsaw puzzle, but I’m inclined to go back to the formative era of the fifties and look at what followed filtered through a sensibility of a bloke who plays some guitar and a bit of piano, writes stuff and has a go at vocalising it.

Much of the prodigious output of written commentary that has emerged over the five decades he’s been with us has, I think, come from the multitude of proto-Dylans you’d have found scattered across the countryside sitting in dimly lit bedrooms, bedsits and college dormitories, reading the Beat poets and their antecedents, musing on various forms of mysticism and tapping things out on typewriters under the influence of whatever substances they were using to fuel their visions.

Most of them, in one sense or another stayed there mentally, many of them forced to modify the old bohemian tendencies by the need to earn a living and provide for wives and children but one of the multitude of proto-Dylans didn’t, and that’s where things get complicated.

A combination of opportunism, manipulation, plagiarism and fusion shaped a career that progressed to the point where Dylan has been able to do more or less what he likes, and what he delivers is misunderstood and misinterpreted by a multitude of thought they could have beens who base their reaction to Dylan on what they think they would have thought, done, written and sung in the same perceived position.

So when Duquesne Whistle kicks off Tempest with a jaunty Western swing most of us are left scratching our heads, wondering if there’s anything more to it than meets the first glance and, when we decide there must be, trying to figure out what it is.

What it is, of course, is a bloke who plays some guitar and a bit of piano, writes stuff and has a go at vocalising it who’s managed to get a pretty decent road band together and, from time to time, has a go at some new material with that band and a few extra instrumental assistants like Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo.

That’s why we get the predictable kerfuffle about plagiarism and related issues. The old bower bird’s never been too concerned about lifting bits and pieces from all over the place, and I’m sure someone with a better knowledge of Western swing than I have would take a listen to Duquesne Whistle and rattle off a couple of tracks that work around a remarkably similar set of licks.

Flick over to Early Roman Kings and you could spend a couple of minutes enumerating the Chicago blues tracks he’s borrowed.

On that basis I’m inclined to be choosy about my Dylan albums. Up to John Wesley Harding, through what I’m inclined to call the classic amphetamine and red wine powered word spinning era I’m fine. Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited are the incarnations I particularly like, but looking back on things in the cold hard light of historical reality he probably went into those sessions with a couple of sheaves of typescript and a few rudimentary ideas about tunes they might fit in with.

Which probably isn’t too different from what he did when the time came to cut Tempest.

There’ll be a couple more runs through the album once this review’s posted, but I’ve already discarded the title track and Roll On John isn't far off the same fate. Of the rest, Duquesne Whistle is a definite keeper, swinging along like it’s going out of fashion and it genuinely sounds like everyone on board is having a good dash of old-fashioned 100% fun.

Soon After Midnight might be rather obvious when it comes to rhymes (money/honey, fearful/cheerful, harlot/scarlet), but there’s a band locked into a languid groove and there’s a healthy dose of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde on the rollicking Narrow Way. It’s not quite Rainy Day Women but it’s not far off. Seven minutes of experienced road warriors running through something they’ve just about got off by heart (the feel, rather than the actual tune, though it’s awful familiar, as are those guitar licks behind the vocal).


Long and Wasted Years maintains that groove, with the band playing something that’s deeply internalised they could do it in a coma. Four tracks, four keepers that won’t have the shuffle button being called into action on a regular basis.

You could say much the same about Pay In Blood, where the weatherbeaten voice is an ideal match for the lyrical content. Some dodgy rhymes, sure, but that’s hardly a new development where Dylan’s concerned.

Things drop back a notch for Scarlet Town, though the minimal riff is as persistent as its brothers have been throughout and the bleakness continues through the lyrics. Your mileage may vary as far as Early Roman Kings is concerned, particularly if you have a degree of difficulty aligning the title with the lyrical content, though you might also see the riff as being a little too closely related to Muddy Waters’ I’m a Man. I’m inclined to think we’re talking the Mafia or some similar organization for the lyrical content, though mileages will invariably vary.

For mine, the wheels start to fall off once Dylan moves from observation, allegory or whatever figurative tag you choose into narrative. There’s plenty of narrative in the sources from which Dylan draws his material, and the murder/revenge quest manhunt tracking down an abducted wife in Tin Angel works reasonably well. On the other hand, close to fourteen minutes of Tempest has been moved into shuffle forward territory. I’m not overly rapt in Roll On John which is probably skirting dangerously close to the same fate.

So where are we on studio album number thirty-five?

Pretty much where we’ve been since the early days is my summation of the situation. A bloke who plays some guitar and a bit of piano, writes stuff and has a go at vocalising it. The voice might be close to shot, the writing may or may not be as good as it was (depending on how you define quality) but there’s no doubting the fact that the old buzzard has assembled a crackerjack band, and they slot into the material as well as any assemblage of musos he’s managed to round up in the past;

And, more significantly, he’s still going, and hasn’t, it seems, surrendered to the all-too-familiar urge to keep oneself going by regurgitating what we’ve done in our notional heyday.

John Hiatt "Mystic Pinball" (4.5*)



I had Radio National’s The Music Show on in the background when I turned my thoughts to a review of John Hiatt’s latest recording and had already decided consistency was going to be the theme to riff off this time around. Andrew Ford kicked off with a track from the new Van Morrison, and that, I thought, was the way into this one.

Around fifteen years back I was aenjoying Van the Man. He seemed to have located a rather pleasant groove,  was mining that seam rather well and seemed to be displaying a fair degree of consistency with the odd flash of brilliance. I started to cool towards Mr Morrison somewhere around the turn of the century and while I haven’t heard all of the half dozen sets of new material between The Skiffle Sessions and Born to Sing I’ve heard (and read) enough to suggest we’re moving from groove into rut where Morrison’s concerned, largely due to an apparent willingness to surrender to an innate tendency towards Grumpy Old Man With a Substantial Chip on the Shoulder and a Simmering Resentment Concerning the Price of Fame.

In any case, what I heard at the start of The Music Show on 6 October sounded a hell of a lot like what he was doing fifteen years ago, so I’m inclined to give Born to Sing the old flick pass. The new John Hiatt, on the other hand, comes as a reminder that Hiatt remains on the automatic purchase list, and we definitely need to fill in the gaps in the back catalogue, starting with 2008’s Same Old Man.

The first thing to note is the continuity from Dirty Jeans & Mudslide Hymns. Hiatt has kept his regular road band (Doug Lancio on electric guitar, dobro and mandolin, Patrick O'Hearn on bass, and Kenneth Blevins on drums) for the instrumental component and producer Kevin Shirley in the control room.

Lancio has been on board since The Open Road and the rhythm section dates back to Same Old Man, so you’d expect them to be up to just about anything Hiatt can throw at them. Dirty Jeans had an uncharacteristic slickness to it, and this time around Shirley pares things back a little while still keeping the sound sharp and focussed.


See the opener, We're Alright Now for a close to faultless, radio friendly example  of what I’m talking about, straight into a chugging heartbeat rhythm, funky, roar it out on the highway chorus (complete with handclaps). Gets things moving right from the get go, very much in the tradition of Riding With The King.

As is often the case where Hiatt is concerned, it’s about character sketches rather than autobiography. There’s a girlfriend who gets her jollies from drawing blood on Bite Marks, and recollections of a former lover doing a hundred miles an hour through the trailer park on a motor cycle without a helmet before slamming into a concrete drain pipe on It All Comes Back Someday. Wood Chipper kicks off with an admonition to beware any conversation a man starts by calling you Skipper, has a bloke track his ex- and her new bloke on the run after an armed robbery down to a shack in the middle of nowhere. He bangs his knee on the wood chipper in the yard, winds up dead and ground up for bait and finishes the tale from the hereafter. Justice is done in the end since they’re ambushed down the road by the forces of law and order. She ends up dead and the cops are puzzling over what seems to be a coded note found in her breast pocket. The note, as it turns out, is a shopping list.

The casual listener might be inclined to dismiss My Business as a throw away, but the tune gives Hiatt and The Combo a chance to rock out as they head into Howlin’ Wolf territory (there’s a howl at the end to round off the Wolf style riffage), and the change of pace as they rock out leads rather neatly into I Just Don't Know What to Say  a slower number in the we’re losing it and I’m bewildered mode that features a rather tasty solo from Mr Lancio (whose playing is consistently excellent throughout) and some rather tasty imagery as the protagonist admits he’s lost for words as he surveys what’s left of a relationship he’s not ready to give up on.

The main character, whoever he is, in I Know How to Lose You has a slightly different problem. He’s been bouncing from woman to woman and playing the field, but it’s only a means to distract him from the memory of the one he actually loves. After those heavier themes, you need something to lighten the mood, and it comes in the form of a crunchy groove on You're All the Reason I Need.We’re back in lost love territory for One of Them Damn Days where an embittered alcoholic is back on a bender after sights his ex with someone else across town. He’s just not sure which day it was...

The lighter side of things gets another guernsey in No Wicked Grin, sweet without being cloying and Give It Up continues in upbeat mode, even if the narrator’s begging a mate to get himself off the sauce or whatever additive he’s using to make his life bearable. The pendulum swings back slightly for Blues Can't Even Find Me, with a protagonist who can’t see the big picture anymore if there’s even one to view.

By this point in a lengthy career long term fans know Hiatt’s not likely to be springing any surprises on you, but that’s not a problem. You’re virtually assured of a well-honed collection of songs with intelligent lyrics, each one more than likely telling a story or portraying a character, on a new Hiatt album, along with an instrumental accompaniment delivered with precision, down and dirty when it needs to be, crisp and clear when that’s the appropriate approach.

Another worthy effort from a master craftsman who has always been comfortably ahead of the pack, and not that far behind the likes of Costello, Thompson and Newman in my personal iconography.

Anders Osborne "Black Eye Galaxy" (4.5*)

There’s inevitably a point where writing from and about personal experience threatens to tip over into too much information territory, and when confronted with the opening track of Anders Osborne’s latest recording you can’t help thinking things are definitely about to tip in that direction. Send Me A Friend kicks off with a thunderous riff straight out of Led Zeppelin territory, a howl of psychic torture pleading for assistance in the face of addiction.

If that’s how he starts the album where does he take it from here? might be an obvious question, but I, for one, was hoping it wouldn’t be more of the same. The prospect of spending a little under an hour faced with pile-driving riffs and tormented wails doesn’t hold much attraction these days, but fortunately Osborne understands the need for light and shade.

After that bludgeoning start, the personal experience bit continues through Mind Of A Junkie, seven and a half confessional minutes that threatens to head off into too much information as far as the lyrical content is concerned but sets things up for a lengthy guitar solo that’s a masterpiece of transcendental restraint and verges on the best aspects of Neil Young territory.

After the dark on the first two tracks the lighter side of things kicks in on Lean On Me/Believe In You and When Will I See You Again? Two love songs with a sunny West Coast groove that brings the Laurel Canyon troubadour school to mind in much the same way as the previous track invoked Neil Young work nicely as a contrast to what’s gone before and what’s in store.

Co-written with Little Feat’s Paul Barrere, a man who’s fought his own inner demons and come through pretty well, Black Tar reads best as another reference to former addiction but works almost as well if you read it as a reference to the notorious BP oil spill in the Gulf. Either way it’s big on Led Zep lurch and thunderously buzzy guitar riffage.

After that, there’s an understandable element of winding things back down in eleven and a bit minutes of Black Eye Galaxy, a track that starts off in the same territory as Lean On Me/Believe In You and When Will I See You Again?  and then, around the 3:40 mark meanders off into a lengthy solo that has definite elements of late sixties Jerry Garcia. Think Dark Star and you’re in the right postcode and I’d have thought Black Eye Galaxy > Dark Star was a dead giveaway as far as titles and influences go in this instance. There’s a dash of the old Jimi Hendrix 1983 just before the vocals come back for a final chorus.

A harmonica intro to Tracking My Roots leads into another folksy effort that looks back to Osborne’s Swedish origin and his subsequent wanderings, a theme that persists through Louisiana Gold and another Osborne-Barrere co-write in Dancing In The Wind sets things up for a strong finish, a sweet acoustic love song that contrasts nicely with much of what has gone before.

Co-written with New Orleans pianist Henry Butler Higher Ground closes the album with a gospel testament where the string section owes more to contemporary classical music than the blues or New Orleans tradition. With his daughter and wife singing in a choir of friends and family it closes the song cycle on a note of triumph and personal salvation that could be extended to take in his adopted city’s resilience in the face of the worst the weather, fate and humanity can throw in its direction.

Recorded at Dockside Studio in Maurice, Louisiana, and co-produced by Osborne, Galactic drummer Stanton Moore, and engineer Warren Riker, Osborne handles most of the instrumental work with assistance from Moore and Eric Bolivar on drums and percussion, Carl Dufrene (ex-Tab Benoit’s band) on bass and additional guitar from Billy Iuso.

Where American Patchwork dealt with Osborne’s past struggles with addiction, Black Eyed Galaxy offers the prospect of recovery and delivers a song cycle that runs from the close to too much information situation in Send Me A Friend to a sense of that’s good, hope he makes it at the end. It’s a journey from addiction to sobriety, dark into light, storm into calm and suggests Osborne is hitting his straps in the writing department alongside his considerable instrumental chops and heartfelt vocals. I’ll be watching eagerly for the next instalment.

Dylan LeBlanc "Cast The Same Old Shadow" (4*)

Given a Mojo review concluding Greatness beckons Dylan LeBlanc’s Paupers Field could be seen as an introduction to a significant talent. With the release of Album #2 it’s time to do some assessing of progress made.

My own view of the debut was that it sounds more or less exactly like you'd expect it to sound, given the fact that Mr LeBlanc credits Townes Van Zandt, Neil Young and Spooner Oldham as formative influences and while it was nothing earth-shattering very few things these days are, but in any case worth a listen and I’ll be watching out for his next effort, which was purchased as soon as it was sighted on the horizon.

A glance at the brooding figure on the cover suggests he’s working the Townes Van Zandt end of the influences this time around, and there’s a dreamy melancholy as the interestingly titled Part One: The End starts proceedings, and what sounds like a direct lift from I Saw Three Ships Go Sailing By (or whatever it’s called) leads into Innocent Sinner, three and a bit minutes of Americana noir.

Brother starts off in much the same vein, but lifts into the chorus, making a change of pace that’s as much about light and shade as an inclination to rock out. Lush strings and weepy pedal steel claim the foreground for Diamonds and Pearls (the only non-LeBlanc composition on the album) and the yearning continues through Where Are You Now, just under five minutes of passed over for someone else, a vibe that runs into the ageing alcoholic reflecting on his youth and lost love in Chesapeake Lane.

By this point in proceedings we’re looking at an album that goes to fit a mood or situation rather than working as entertainment. Bleak reflections on love and loss continue through The Ties That Bind and while Comfort Me sounds a little jauntier the pedal steel isn’t suggesting everything’s sweetness and light until an instrumental break around the 3:20 mark that leads back into the keening melancholy that’s LeBlanc’s vocal trade mark.

There’s no relief in store through Cast the Same Old Shadow and while there’s a momentary distraction in the form of a crackle of radio static and studio chatter leading into Lonesome Waltz the song itself is cut from the same cloth as what’s gone before, as are Our Great Sadness (a dead giveaway, that title) and Too Wise.

Cut, like his debut, in Alabama's Muscle Shoals Sound Studios and co-produced by three-time Grammy winner Trina Shoemaker, Cast the Same Old Shadow offers up a dozen songs of love and loss that work rather well as a suite, though uninterrupted bleakness makes it an album that needs the right setting if you’re up for a close listen.

If, on the other hand, you’re after something lush with a voice that filters Neil Young through, say, Chris Isaak and works as an element in a sonic landscape rather than a lead instrument that’ll operate at subdued volume and minimise the desolation while you’re reading late at night it could well go down a charm.

Greatness may well have beckoned, and while it hasn’t got here yet it’s definitely lurking just over the horizon.

Scrapomatic "I'm a Stranger (And I Love The Night)" (4*)

Their fourth album sees the Scrapomatic core duo of Mike Mattison and Paul Olsen joined by guitarist Dave Yoke, Ted Pecchio on bass and Tedeschi Trucks Band drummer Tyler Greenwell, and the result is very much a band record rather than the duo plus backing (admittedly, very classy backing, but still a group of session musos playing someone’s arrangements of the material the duo has delivered) on Scrapomatic.

In between, of course, we’ve had Alligator Love Cry (2006) and Sidewalk Caesars (2008) and a regular gig with the Derek Trucks Band and, more recently, the Tedeschi Trucks Band for singer Mike Mattison. That probably goes a fair way to explaining the four year gap before album #4. Olsen probably has plenty to keep him occupied on the writing, arranging and musical director side of things, so there mightn’t be quite the sense of financial imperative that comes with something that’s your main gig, but a run through the dozen tracks on offer here reveals an interesting mix of styles that fit comfortably under an overall understated blues rock umbrella.

Produced by Mattison and recorded at Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi’s Raga Swamp Studios in Jacksonville, what we’ve got here is another manifestation of the emerging family of related projects that brought us the Derek Trucks Band’s Already Free and the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Revelator, and on the strength of a dozen listens it’s another exercise in tasteful blues based rock that mightn’t demand your attention right this minute and hold it right there, but probably won’t have you reaching for the shuffle button either.

Two contrasting voices, Mattison’s rasp and Olsen’s croon and an increasingly rocky approach as Yoke and the rhythm section integrate themselves into the overall approach means there’s always something interesting going on, and when you focus on the lyrics there’s a little more than you might have thought, which I’m inclined to ascribe to Mattison’s background in literature.

That definitely seems to be the case with the serial killer exacting vengeance down on the bayou among the shotgun shacks and magnolia trees in Alligator Love Cry. Olsen’s I'm A Stranger (And I Love The Night) delivers an evocative take on the post-dusk autumn streets of New York City, and the tempo lifts for Rat Trap, which gives the rhythm section a solid workout and Yoke a chance to cut loose. The vibe continues through Night Trains, Distant Whistles, which isn’t quite the wistful number the title might suggest.

Things drop back a tad for Don't Fall Apart On Me Baby and I Surrender, but they’re rocking out from the kick off in Mother Of My Wolf, where the literary bit gets another airing (I said ‘I just come out from high school’/She said ‘I read Camus in jail). The down and dirty blues kicks in on Crime Fighter as Mattison’s falsetto gets a workout and Yoke delivers some guitar licks that are straight out of the less is more school of playing handbook, with shades of Mike Bloomfield in the precision cut solo.

The horn-driven Malibu (That's Where It Starts) grooves along nicely but comes to a rather abrupt end, pitching the listener straight into How Unfortunate For Me, one of the album’s highlights, with muted trumpet delivering a touch of New Orleans as Mattison wryly observes the pitfalls of infatuation (With you I am enchanted/How unfortunate for me).

If I’ve got a gripe with the album, it’s aimed at the sequencing, since despite the possibility that The Party's Over there’s the suggestion that we make it one more for the road, which might have been the right place to stop, but they’ve opted to go one more for the road.  While Gentrification Blues ties in with some of the album’s lyrical themes, it isn’t the strongest closer you’ve heard. At the same time I’m not sure else where else it might fit. One for the shuffle button, I fear.

Still, while it might have finished more strongly without that last track, I’m a Stranger (And I Love the Night) delivers a satisfying listening experience and a passing visitor a couple of days ago was heard to remark on the quality and ask who it was, so it definitely has something to offer.

There’s plenty out there that falls under the umbrella of Americana, but Scrapomatic’s semi-noir take on the genre is worth a listen, and I’ll be watching the horizon for rumours of album #5.

Ry Cooder "Election Special" (4.5*)

At the start of Randolph Stow’s Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy the recently orphaned protagonist is sitting outside the house, whittling sticks and forgetting to cook his supper when his Siamese cat, Khat, takes things into his own hands (or, I guess, paws) and starts talking in an attempt to get things straightened out in the tucker department. Asked to explain this unexpected development (you never talked before) he answered there was nothing to talk about.

You might think I’m stretching things a bit by suggesting a correlation between Midnite and Ry Cooder, but consider the stats. Eleven studio albums between late 1970 and 1987 with a handful of tracks that weren’t covers. That situation is reversed in the batch of recordings that followed 2005’s Chavez Ravine, where Ryland had to cast around a bit to find a narrative that matched the theme of a Mexican-American community demolished to make way for public housing, a project that was subverted and turned into a baseball stadium.

That was followed by My Name is Buddy’s folkie exploration of Depression era issues straight out of Grapes of Wrath territory involving labour agitators, strikes, company cops and skid row hobos, I Flathead’s beatniks, salt-flat hot rod racers and pedal steel-playing country musicians (the post-war children of the Depression era Okies, or at least that’s the way I interpret it) and the Los Angeles Stories collection of prose about the city and the era he grew up in, covering some of the same territory.

Not bad going. Six years, three storytelling albums and a collection of prose by a bloke whose original material had landed almost exclusively on the fifteen movie soundtracks he compiled between The Long Riders in 1980 and 1998’s Primary Colours.

So he could write, if he wanted to. He just needed something to write about.

There’s a fairly obvious left wing social democratic mindset evident from Chavez Ravine onwards, something that shouldn’t come as a surprise given the presence of Woody Guthrie’s Do Re Mi and Alfred Reed’s How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live on his first album forty-two years ago.

Election Special kicks off in scathing style with Mutt Romney Blues as Cooder assumes the identity of the Republican Party candidate’s faithful hound, lashed to the roof of the vehicle as the family heads off on vacation (Boss Mitt Romney went for a ride/Pulled up on the highway side/Tied me down up on the roof/Boss I hollered woof woof woof), and follows it with a visit to the crossroads in Brother Is Gone, where oil tycoon Charles Koch and his brother David make a deal with the Devil, chasing political power and riches rather than musical prowess and fame. In this version, Robert Johnson’s crossroads have been shifted to Wichita, the brothers lay waste to the land and its people, but Satan turns up looking for the payment for his side of the bargain.

The Wall Street Part of Town dates back to the Pull Up Some Dust sessions but didn’t make the cut for that album. It’s a natural fit for the more pointedly political material this time around and while topical material attending a political agenda can get old pretty quickly, one suspects The Wall Street Part of Town and Guantanamo, which regardless of the political content rocks along very nicely, thank you and will both be kicking around the fringes of Hughesy’s Top 1500 Most Played for a while.

Pull Up Some Dust’s John Lee Hooker for President gets reincarnated as Cold Cold Feeling, a bluesman’s lament supposedly delivered by a sleepless Obama as he makes his way through the White House corridors in the wee small hours. Seems the Republicans are out to resegregate the White House and the incumbent’ll have to go in through the kitchen door.

Still on the subject of the Republicans Going to Tampa has one of the delegates bidding his wife goodbye as he heads off to get my ashes hauled. Never mind the family values, here’s the change to get your rocks off in an environment where Sarah Palin calls me honey. Given the string band country hoedown in the musical department this one’s another keeper that could well be around my playlist long after the 2012 election is done and dusted.

Delta-style blues get a guernsey on Kool-Aid, which deals with those who drank from the poisoned chalice of tax cuts for the rich. The protagonist (and, remember, on the tracks where there’s an obvious protagonist he’s not necessarily a good guy) falls for the Bush administration’s propaganda, enlists in the military and heads off to Iraq or Afghanistan and returns to find his job gone.

Themes from the Occupy movement come to the fore in The 90 and the 9, which is firmly in the Woody Guthrie/Joe Hill tradition, a workers’ song that stresses the belief that this may be the last time for the 99 percent of the population that includes America’s besieged unionists.

Election Special needs to finish on a strong note, and it arrives in the form of a militant blues, a snarling demand that the right wing ideologues Take Your Hands Off It, it being the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, though the final chorus extends things a tad (Get your bloody hands off the peoples of the world/And your war machine and your corporation thieves/That lets you keep your job and pays your dirty salary/Take your hands off us, you know we don’t belong to you).

Strong stuff, but stuff that reflects concerns that run right back through Cooder’s career. As son of liberal folkies, brought up on a diet of Woody Guthrie records, (Cooder: I’m 65; I’ve been listening to this shit all my life, and playing it, since I was a little tiny kid, startin’ with Woody at age five. Sourced here).

From there, once he’s figured out something he wants to say, it’s a fairly straightforward exercise to find an appropriate genre (or rather sub-genre) to deliver the message, and regardless of the perishability of topical song Cooder’s scholarly knowledge of a variety of styles and his proven ability to play them should allow him to continue to produce recordings of this calibre through the foreseeable future.

Much as some of us might want them to, you can’t help suspecting the issues that have attracted Ryland’s attention are going to disappear overnight.

Little Feat "Rooster Rag" (4.5*)

There isn’t, as has frequently been remarked, a superannuation fund for working musicians and given the nature of the beast it’s unlikely many of those who haven’t enjoyed the heights of commercial success and subsequently managed to hang on to the proceeds are likely to have too much stashed away to fund their retirement.

Which, of course, explains why so many of the musos I’ve been listening to for the past forty-five years are out on the road. Given the state of the record industry at the moment you could be inclined to attach a Why bother? sticky note to any plans to record new material, but when you’re on the road the merchandise table provides a vitally important income stream.

That’s how I’m inclined to read the proliferation of live albums, compilations and DVD material in Little Feat’s twenty-first century discography anyway.

A glance at the discography page here reveals four studio albums after 1998’s Under the Radar lined up beside nine live efforts, six compilations and three DVD titles (bearing in mind the coincidence of the two versions of Rockpalast). That’s a fair chunk of product to lay out alongside the T-shirts, stubby coolers, key rings and other paraphernalia on the merch table but you’ll also need a collection of new material from time to time. There are, after all, only so many ways you can repackage your back catalogue.

Initial reports about Rooster Rag, which is, just so we can get the statistics out of the way early, the band’s sixteenth studio outing, suggested we were in for an album of blues covers, and while the Rag kicks off with a tasty rendition of Mississippi John Hurt’s Candy Man Blues, and concludes with a romp through Willie Dixon’s Mellow Down Easy featuring the (underused, at least as far as I’m concerned) vocals of Sam Clayton, I’m glad they opted to fill the middle with new material.

Hair-splitters will, of course, question tagging the four Fred Tackett compositions here as new material, with A Church Falling Down dating back to his 2003 solo album (In a Town Like This) and One Breath at a Time, Tattooed Girl and Jamaica Will Break Your Heart making an appearance on Silver Strings around two years ago.

The album is fleshed out with a single contribution from Paul Barrere (Just a Fever, co-written with the late Stephen Bruton) and no less than five contributions co-written by keyboard ace Bill Payne. Of those five, four are co-authored by Robert Hunter, long time lyricist for the Grateful Dead, with the final co-write giving the band’s most recent recruit, drummer Gabe Ford a writing credit.

Ford had been Richie Hayward’s drum technician until lung cancer took founding member Hayward out of the mix, and the gig became permanent when Richie succumbed to pneumonia in August 2010.

As the band shuffles into Candy Man (one they’ve been doing live for a while, usually as a segue out of Down On The Farm) with the nudge nudge, wink wink sensibility that runs right through the band’s best material, it’s obvious Ford’s got Richie’s drum groove right down pat. That’s followed by the album’s title track, the first of the Payne/Hunter compositions, an exercise in jaunty Americana with good time fiddle from Larry Campbell.

Fred Tackett’s moody Church Falling Down drops things back a couple of notches, with mandolin and understated vocals on an evocative gospel ballad about changing times that contrasts nicely with the earthier themes in the Payne/Hunter Salome, set in a Louisiana houseboat that serves as a whorehouse and dishes up soul food on the side.

One Breath at a Time reworks the Fred Tackett solo version by splitting the vocal three ways, with Fred, Paul Barrere, and Sam Clayton going turn about through a ballad that has more than a dash of Mose Allison in the recipe.

The good time boogie comes to the fore in the Barrere/Bruton Just a Fever that grooves along merrily and is succeeded by a classic road song in Rag Top Down with Hunter’s highway imagery delivered by a warm Bill Payne vocal. There’s more of the same on Way Down Under (Payne/Hunter) while Paul Barrere rather than writer Fred Tackett gets the vocal slot on the wistful Jamaica Will Break Your Heart. Fred’s back in the limelight for Tattooed Girl, which shares much of the same mood as its predecessor and the blues are back for The Blues Keep Coming and Willie Dixon’s Mellow Down Easy, where a characteristically husky Sam Clayton vocal and some blues harp from ex-Fabulous Thunderbird Kim Wilson.

Considered as a whole Rooster Rag is another excursion through familiar territory with the regular Feat fusion of rock, blues, country, R&B and funky jazz with enough new elements (Hunter’s contribution being the prime example) to differentiate it slightly from what has gone before while retaining continuity. For mine, there’s no one else out there that sounds quite like the Feat and the production job from Bill Payne and Paul Barrere presents everything in a crisp, clear setting.

In the end, however, while it’s a rather tasty collection of fresh material there isn’t much that’s going to force many of what I’ve termed the night by night usual suspects out of the set lists.

Which, from where I’m sitting, is fine. Dedicated fans attending concerts probably want to hear the obscurities or new material, which is understandable. Those with a nodding acquaintance with the band probably expect the usual suspects (particularly the one long term fans have been known to term That Damn Chicken Song) and anyone who isn’t too familiar with the extensive back catalogue probably needs to hear the tried and tested material that tends to make the strongest impression.

In the absence of a superannuation fund for working musos, efforts like Rooster Rag are a vital component in keeping it going and maintaining a degree of freshness. On that basis, I can heartily recommend it with the suggestion that, if you’re new to the Feat (and face it, they aren’t exactly a high profile outfit on the international stage these days, regardless of seventies muso peer acclamation) and Rooster Rag tickles your fancy you’ll find plenty to explore in that extensive back catalogue.

Arnaldo Antunes, Toumani Diabaté & Edgard Scandurra "A Curva Da Cintura" (4*)

With this release it’s just about official. Following Kulanjan and Afrocubism, his collaborations with Ali Farka Toure, and his own work, solo or with the Symmetric Orchestra, Toumani Diabaté is another name on Hughesy’s buy anything this dude appears on list.

That’s because, on the evidence to date, Toumani Diabaté isn’t just a master of the kora, that West African cross between harp and lute, he’s also a master collaborator when it comes to cross-cultural musical experiments. As such, I can’t help comparing him to Robert Randolph, who’s probably my favourite sit in and jam instrumentalist. That may sound like a big call, but cast the peepers over this bit of YouTubeage from the Los Lobos Live at the Fillmore DVD. I’ve also seen him sit in with the Allman Brothers as well (though the footage doesn’t seem to have crept onto YouTube), and while he’s capable of taking a stinging lead with the best of them, the rest of the time you can see him looking for a spot where he can sneak a lick in, and when he does it’s managed with taste and dexterity.

Playing the much harder to amplify kora, of course, Toumani doesn’t get the chance to sling in stinging lead breaks, but through everything I’ve heard him collaborating on he manages to sneak things into the mix in much the same way as Mr Randolph. One suspects peer group recognition of this ability has a lot to do with frequent invitations to collaborate.

This time around, however, it seems to have been Toumani doing the inviting. After collaborating with Sao Paulo alternative rocker, songwriter, poet and artist Arnaldo Antunes and guitarist Edgard Scandurra at the 2010 Back2Black festival in Brazil, he invited the pair to record with him in Mali. They arrived in Bamako in April 2011 with a collection of songs they had written, and the result, once they’d got together with Diabaté and a selection of other Malian musicians, is an Afro-Brazilian fusion that doesn’t work in quite the same way as Kulanjan or Afrocubism.

Where those other collaborations brought traditional material from both sides of the fence and blurred them in together, here we’re looking at new territory as the Brazilian vibe is set against a different backdrop rather than taking a bit of samba and slipping it in among the Africanisms. We’re looking, in effect, at a Brazilian record with added tonality through the kora and balafon though there’s a reworking of Diabate's Kaira, and African vocals and instrumentation come to the fore on Ir, Mao.

Now, given the fact that the lyrics are in Portuguese, you’re not going to get a whole lot out of the words, so it’s probably best to treat the whole exercise as a soundscape, and while things are a little uneven, veering between fairly straightforward melodies and complex fills, laid back ballads and rocking psychedelia as Toumani's son Sidiki whacks his kora through a wah wah pedal.

The key elements on the Brazilian side of the soundscape are, predictably, Antunes’ voice and Scandurra’s guitar work (in both acoustic and electric modes) while the father and son kora combo, the vocals of Zoumana Tereta, Fode Lassana Diabaté’s balafon and Zoumana Tereta’s soku fiddle add the African light and shade. The result is an interesting listening experience that mightn’t be everyone’s cup of tea but will ensure I’ll be lining to hand over the readies when a new project with Toumani Diabaté’s name in the credits appears on the market.

Robin Williamson "Love Will Remain" (3.5* for the non-ISB Masses)

Back in the salad days of the late sixties I could usually find someone out of my circle of friends and acquaintances willing to admit that, yes, there was a certain something about whatever musical effort I was raving over at the time. There was, however, one notable exception.

I was, as far as I could tell, the only one out of my pre-University circle of acquaintances who’d managed to acquire a taste for the Incredible String Band. Reactions whenever Wee Tam or The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter hit the turntable were almost invariably negative, often emphatically so, and I seem to recall the almost invariable cause was the eccentric vocal stylings of Robin Williamson.

On that basis, while the rating above suggests an unimpressed listener in the Little House of Concrete, as a long term ISB fan my personal rating would be half a notch higher for anyone reading these pages inclined towards musical adventurism.

Recorded with minimal instrumental accompaniment, while time has taken the edge off Williamson’s voice it’s the characterful vocals that form the centrepiece of the album, whether it’s the autobiographical musical reminiscence of I Always Followed Music or Love Will Remain: Song for Bina, the spoken word recollections of A Road Wound Winding or the reworkings of Pink Floyd (Chapter 24), The Band (Whispering Pines) or, in what you might think is an unlikely alignment, George Jones (Stoned On Your Love All the Time).

An acquired taste, perhaps, but a taste worth exploring if you’re inclined towards adventurous inventiveness from someone who’s not using anything beyond a basic palette.

Joe Bonamassa "Driving Towards the Daylight" (3*)

I guess, in the end, it comes down to how you like your blues-rock. After ten studio albums (this is his eleventh), four live albums and three live DVDs there’s obviously a market for what Joe Bonamassa’s peddling out there, and it’s a market that was strong enough to vault this album as high as #2 on the U.K. Albums chart. That doesn’t mean as much as it did once upon a time, but still counts as a significant achievement indicating a fair degree of consumer recognition.

That U.K. chart action may also have something to do with the fact that Bonamassa cites the British and Irish re-interpreters rather than the Afro-American originators as his primary influences, so we’re talking Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Paul Kossoff, Peter Green and Rory Gallagher rather than Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and T-Bone Walker (though he does acknowledge B.B. King).

But while he boasts a fairly impressive curriculum vitae, including appearances with B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, Joe Cocker, Paul Rodgers, Gregg Allman, Steve Winwood, Warren Haynes, Eric Clapton, Derek Trucks, and Jack Bruce, Driving Towards the Daylight (which arrived on the doorstep as a freebie associated with a Rhythms magazine subscription) won’t be prompting too much credit card action on Hughesy’s part.

Heavy on covers rather than originals (an eight-three scoreline rather than the seven-four cited in some quarters since Somewhere Trouble Don't Go is a Buddy Miller rather than a Bonamassa composition) we’ve got some pretty standard blues-rock, tidy enough with plenty of punch in the production. Kevin  Shirley has worked with the Black Crowes, and Aerosmith, so no surprises there and he’s done seven albums in six years with Bonamassa so he knows his stuff and his artist.

Of the originals Dislocated Boy is a fairly standard rifferama that thunders along but doesn’t really go anywhere, the title track delivers a fairly standard weary road warrior power ballad and Heavenly Soul is rather light on for both ingredients in the two word title.

Robert Johnson’s Stones in My Passway gets a solid going over with a riff that verges on the sledgehammer side of things. The best part of Who's Been Talking? is the Howlin’ Wolf instruction to one of the participants in The London Sessions that precedes Bonamassa’s take on it.

Willie Dixon’s I Got All You Need is a fair collection of strutting blues cliches that’s more or less surplus to requirements. It would’ve worked better with someone like Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters doing the bragging, Bonamassa comes across as earnestly entreating rather than issuing a statement of carnal intent.

Bernie Marsden’s A Place in My Heart gets a respectful a power ballad treatment along the Gary Moore lines, Bill Withers’ Lonely Town Lonely Street is transformed into fairly standard blues-metal sludge, Tom Waits’ New Coat of Paint delivers a touch of light and shade and Buddy Miller’s Somewhere Trouble Don't Go doesn’t really succeed in going anywhere apart from delivering a bit of electric guitar sleight of hand and Jimmy Barnes’ Too Much Ain't Enough Love has a Barnes vocal, and with that observation made I rest my case.

Overall, Driving Towards the Daylight is a workman-like effort that will undoubtedly go down well with the appropriate demographic but I’ve heard a swag of this kind of material over the years and to me there isn’t enough to differentiate what’s on offer here from the rest of a fairly well saturated market.