Mike Tramp
Stray From The Flock TARGET
Simple songs, well performed.
For the past
decade, Mike
Tramp has
stripped back
his musical
approach and gone for a style
that owes much to country rock.
It suits him, so Stray From The
Flock carries on this tradition.
You can draw parallels with
Poco and Johnny Cash at times,
but Tramp has a way of
delivering these tunes that’s
refreshing and very much his
own. As such, every track here
has the poignancy and intimacy
to make them personal
statements. No Closure sounds
like a letter of regret to a lost
friend, No End To War has Tramp
painfully reminding himself of
current global uncertainties.
And so it goes on, showing itself
to be an understated album, full
of warmth and depth.
QQQQQQQQQQ
Malcolm DomeMercury Rev
Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta
Sweete Revisited BELLA UNION
Gentry’s lost 1968 classic
reimagined.
There’s trouble
brewin’ once
more up on the
Tallahatchie
Bridge. In the
growing tradition of US psych
rock legends trying their hand at
reimagining classic albums –
although, to their credit, The
Flaming Lips have been screwing
with more revered targets
like Sgt Pepper – Buffalo’s
Mercury Rev have recorded
a full-album homage to Bobbie
Gentry’s second album The Delta
Sweete, a flop on its 1968 release
but a record that the Rev
consider a lost gem that foretold
their own 90s masterpiece,
Deserter’s Songs.
The Delta Sweete was
certainly engrained with
a similar kind of southern gothic
grit and, with the help of a raft of
acclaimed female folk-indie
vocalists, they’ve set about
replacing the original’s easy
listening country-blues joie de
vivre with the atmosphere of
menace and desolation that
these dusty tales of suicide,
murder and poverty have always
deserved. So Sermon and
breadline lament Tobacco Road
become brooding cinematic
noirs, Phoebe Bridgers’ gorgeous
Jessye’ Lisabeth is dappled with
orchestral elegance, and
Parchman Farm is decked out withBob Mould
Sunshine Rock MERGE RECORDS
the sort of ominous space riffs
and forlorn flutes that finally befit
this spiritual blues about a wife-
killer on the chain gang. Cheating,
they also include Gentry’s
breakout 1967 hit Ode To Billie
Joe, Lucinda Williams snarling
the story of Billie’s mysterious
demise like the town’s hoariest
gossip. Sweete, and then,
deliciously soured.
QQQQQQQQQQ
Mark BeaumontCats In Space
Day Trip To Narnia
HARMONY FACTORY
The tuneful felines enter
CS Lewis territory with
gleeful intent.
With Too Many
Gods and
Scarecrow, Cats
In Space
produced songs
as if the 70s were still alive and
kicking. They produced joyful,
melody-rich singalongs, and
they did it all with a sharp sense
of humour, turning the decade of
fuel strikes and the Three-Day
Week into a jubilant,
technicolored celebration of all
that is good and bright and
British. Day Trip To Narnia follows
suit, and while some of the
material veers close to musical
theatre, it’s produced with
enough wit to ensure that
visions of Michael Ball are kept
at arms’ length.
Hologram Man and Tragic Alter
Ego find the band bemoaning the
current state of music – the
latter includes a deliberate tip to
Queen’s Play The Game – while
Silver And Gold is an enthusiastic
tribute to the age of glam that
succeeds in part because it
refuses to employ any glam
tropes. Dominating it all is The
Story Of Johnny Rocket, a buoyant,
27-minute, six-song suite that
tells the story of a lonely boy
with cardboard ‘space wings’. It’s
like normal rock, but shinier.
QQQQQQQQQQ
Fraser LewryFocus
11 IN AND OUT OF FOCUS
New album from old Dutch
Prog masters.
It is 50 years
since Focus
were formed in
Amsterdam by
keyboardist and
flautist Thijs Van Leer. Today
only he remains from the original
line-up, though drummer Pierre
van der Linden did join in 1970.
They’re completed in their most
recent incarnation by Menno
Gootjes and Udo Pannekeet.Latest solo album from ex-Hüsker Dü
frontman sees him embrace the light.F
ollowing a trilogy of relatively
sombre albums, Silver Age (2012),
Beauty & Ruin (2014) and 2016’s Patch
The Sky, the latter informed by the death of
his mother, Bob Mould finishes the
decade with an unexpected broadside of
sanguine energy. This is his biggest,
brightest, most crackling and electric
album since his Sugar days, the product of
a conscious decision to fight a great battle
against the clouds of darkness to which he
has been personally prone in the past.
It’s also the unlikely upshot of a move
to Berlin, where he currently resides.
Unlike David Bowie, however, for whom
the city’s atmospheres inspired the
ambient, atmospheric shades of Low, for
Mould, the city has inspired a burst of
California-like vitamin D to pour forth
from his fretboard.
Mould crashes, barrels and blazes
through the first three tracks, including
the title track and Sunny Love Song,
marshalling all the swerve and raucous
grace of his Hüsker Dü days as he declares
war on despondency, emerging fighting
from the shadows of bereavement. “I’m
trying to keep things brighter these days
as a way to stay alive,” he recently said.
The pace only lets up a little with TheFinal Years, coloured in by keyboard, as he
looks back on his sense of “misplaced
rage”, as well as Irrational Poison – after all,
in order to defeat the black dogs of his past
he must get to grips with them. Lost Faith,
meanwhile, sees him in a sort of dialogue
with himself; in the verse, which sounds
like an outtake from R.E.M circa Fables Of
The Reconstruction, he bemoans a personal
collapse of faith only to rally and slap
himself around in the chorus; ‘Really gotta
stop this now, this is your/Last chance to turn
around, I know we/All lose faith from time to
time, you/Better find your way back home.’
Thereafter, he sets his face towards
sunlit uplands, with the halcyon
childhood memory of Camp Sunshine,
a cover of Shocking Blue’s Send Me
A Postcard, a shaft of late 60s hippy pop
reinfused by latter-day garage rock and
finally, the thanks and praise of Western
Sunset. This is not just a joyful negation of
pain but a resurgence of that mid-80s
moment when, in the face of apparent
exhaustion, artists like Mould
replenished the bellows of rock with
their sheer, determined, creative
resourcefulness and belief.
QQQQQQQQQQ
David Stubbs86 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COMALBUMS