•
Rating: Authentic outdated hippie, the great Georgian singer has fortunately managed to make peace with his guitarist brother Rick Robinson, who had been unavailable for a few years due to his quirks and flashes of inspiration. The Black Crowes project has thus regained full vigor and is currently producing, on a biennial schedule, earthquake-like and beautiful albums of seventies hard/country/soul/blues rock, rustic and straightforward.
Witnesses of the period of discord between the two brothers, which lasted for more than half a decade, remain three solo albums—one by the guitarist and two by the singer. The work in question is Chris's second and last, in my opinion, the most successful but only by a hair's breadth, as the previous "New Earth Mud", released a couple of years earlier in 2002, was a real delight for a fan like me.
Chris Robinson's voice is of absolute quality: a powerful and high sneer, capable of effortlessly overpowering the mighty shock wave of the Black Crows, while still maintaining the invaluable psychedelic, anarchic, romantic quality even in the extreme effort of emission. The beauty is that the almost total absence in this work of the usual, very noisy bandmates allows for an even better appreciation of Chris's virtues, able to take a step back, shout less, and sing more, thereby expressing his deeper nature as a folk rock minstrel, half hippy (actually, three-quarters...), ultimately just... lent to the hard noise, due to his innate eclecticism.
The consistency of Chris's songwriting is of equal quality. Nostalgic rock 'n' roll and melodic, bucolic, political, romantic attitudes blend and alternate in his compositions sometimes extended up to seven or eight minutes and therefore elevated to the rank of hymns. This is the case with the wonderful "When the Cold Wind Blows at the Dark End of Night", lengthy from the title itself and with atmospheric choruses in full voice, permeated with mystical conviction. The same goes for "Girl on the Mountain", a sultry ballad that builds up to an ultra-sonorous and lyrical refrain.
It's a matter of taste, but finding high singer-songwriter qualities along with that kind of powerful and determined approach, typical of a rock frontman, in the same person is quite an achievement, and also quite rare. Here you have the melodic openings, the intense and intimate lyrics but also a very solid performer able to belt them out with full force and maximum grit!
To be fair, Chris doesn't do it all alone: he is well supported by the English guitarist Paul Stacey, who joined the reformed Crowes following this album. I don't know to whom of the two partners most of the credit should be given, but at least half of the dozen songs that make up this work seem beautiful to me! Besides those already mentioned stand out the solid "Like a Tumbleweed in Eden" as well as the descriptive "If You See California", in which the Atlanta musician reveals his whole drawling southern accent. On the more rock 'n' roll side, the opening "40 Days" and the closer "Sea of Love", the only one in the batch that evidently pays homage to the Rolling Stones and even more to Rod Stewart's Faces, in the classic stylistic vein of many Black Crowes pages, are distinguished.
Loading comments slowly
