African roots are most strikingly evident on "Hookers In The Street", where his and Futoshi Morioka's electric guitars interlace their riffs in the Tuareg desert-blues manner of Tinariwen. It's a dark, gripping style which unites Appalachian country and Delta blues modes with jazz and the music's African forebears.The presence of blues fiddle creates a direct link with the recently deceased Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown. Below The Fold continues this personal approach, Taylor drawing on events and observations to create a song cycle illuminating the African-American experience in the 20th century, from documented outrages such as the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, when the Colorado National Guard shot dead the wives and children of striking miners ("Your Children Sleep Good Tonight"), to his own childhood recollection of learning to refer to his mother's lesbian lover as his "sister". It's a dramatic blend of the private and the public, with a keen awareness of how both are bound up in politics of one form or another - whether it's the widower in "Hookers In The Street", regretting how his mistreatment of his late wife has resulted in his own estrangement from his children; or the collective insult involved in "Government Lied", telling how Nazis were called to account by the US government for murdering white GIs, but not for the negroes they killed alongside them.Taylor delivers these blues commentaries in a style he's dubbed "trance blues", with the cyclical, hypnotic figures of his banjo, mandolin or guitar underpinned by fatback funk drums and skirling drones of organ, fiddle and cello, and on some tracks, the desolate trumpet of Ron Miles. Otis Taylor is a singular talent, as might be expected of a bluesman who originally learned to play banjo while riding his unicycle to school.Below The Fold is his seventh album, but the first, to my knowledge, available here. "Fountain of Sorrow" is perhaps his most exquisitely wistful reminiscence-song, its effect skilfully prompted by the recognition of "the trace of sorrow" in the eyes of a lover in an old photo.
Previous releases such as 2001's White African and 2003's Truth Is Not Fiction have dealt with a family history involving such grievances as the murder of his uncle and the lynching of his great-grandfather. DOWNLOAD THIS: 'These Days', 'Fountain of Sorrow', 'For Everyman' 'Take It Easy'. It's an enjoyably articulate hour, climaxing with Browne's most famous composition "Take It Easy", which has, he explains, been covered in countless languages. "For Everyman" was Browne's more communitarian response to his rich friends' privileged pipe-dream of sailing away from worldly woes (as outlined in CS&N's "Wooden Ships"), while the prescience of later, political material such as "Lives in the Balance" and "Looking East" is neatly summarised in his claim that "some of these songs were meant to be sung in the darkest of times". Their best chance of chart success will surely come via "Turn This Thing Around", which sets the aforementioned Elton-prompting line within a sleek 1980s disco-soul setting. DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Turn This Thing Around', 'Keep on Walking', 'Without You'. This is a collection of solo live performances of some of the songwriter's most famous songs, punctuated by his pithy, often droll comments on their genesis.
The musical influences are marginally less camp than the Scissors', ranging from the George Harrison-ic slide guitar on "Without You" and the Sweet-style pop-metal riff of "100 MPH" to traces of Prince and Primal Scream. The second single "100 MPH" likewise looks forward to "a high speed Saturday night". They've been called "the Glaswegian Scissor Sisters", to Gizzi's chagrin. But if he wasn't seeking the comparison, why affect such a striking impression of Jake Shears' excitable pop falsetto? Or devise a similar retro-Seventies musical style? Or, taking things a bit far, prompt memories of Elton through the line, "I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind"? There's a similar veneer of bohemian chic about the band's attitude, with the first single "Rocket" being a fizzy, pounding techno-pop celebration of drug-rush energy, with the hook, "I'm gonna block it, fly like a rocket". Great things are expected from El Presidente, fronted by former Gun bassist Dante Gizzi. He even lets the jew's harp - in Asia sometimes used by horse-thieves to communicate across valleys - hold centre-stage.