C.W. Stoneking
Gon' Boogaloo

Hold on, everyone. To talk to you about this guy here, C.W. Stoneking, we need to take some time, sit down, maybe sipping a nice bourbon or even just a good American coffee. Because these 12 tracks are soaked in caffeine and whiskey. And especially because good old Stoneking plays with time to his liking.

Stoneking is adding to the new wave of devotees to the blues gospel in its most classic, or better, archetypal version. The pre-war kind, of Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, the big bang of the genre, the cotton plantations and Alan Lomax going to record broke colored folks in their shacks in Louisiana. Right from the start of “How Long” the effect is so disorienting that you cannot consistently date the music that emerges. Too clean to be a recording of the era but absolutely anachronistic for everything else. A track that seems to exist simultaneously in two times very far apart from each other. A musical quantum leap that short-circuits the brain and confuses interpretive coordinates.

It's all too perfect to be true: the Bull and Kelly sisters' choruses on “The Zombie”, the proto ska blues of “The Thing I Done”, the future past standards “Mama Got The Blues” and “Tomorrow Gon' Be Too Late”, the proto rock 'n' roll of “Jungle Swim” and the title track. And indeed, it's not true. Or rather, it is more real than the original sound, because it is recreated with often hard-to-find analog equipment (read the recording notes carefully written by Stoneking himself) and recorded with a single ambient microphone, adjusting the tone and power of the instruments by moving them closer or farther from it. As rudimentary as it is effective. The most fascinating and astounding thing is knowing that behind this hoarse and powerful voice with its deeply dark timbre, hides a pale and gaunt 30-year-old.
In conclusion, a record and an artist I strongly recommend, because, despite being a carbon-copy reproduction of an archaic era of music, it turns out to be the most current thing one could wish for today, electronics obviously excluded. And, hype and trends aside, which this type of revival inevitably brings with it, there's a lot of substance as well as form.