Howlin Rain
Magnificent Fiend

Please, someone explain to Ethan Miller that the seventies are long over, that the Hammond organ is no longer used by anyone, and that the unkempt beard-receding hairline duo no longer agrees with the tastes of the young people buying records.

 Songs from another era for people from another era who maybe would have wanted to be there thirty years earlier. This was the operation already accomplished two years ago with the first record of the noise-rockers Comets on Fire's side project: Howlin Rain, the cheapest ticket to travel on Route 66 on a motorcycle towards a summer of freedom and fear.

 This time Ethan makes his music a little more complicated by expanding the lineup with an excellent multi-instrumentalist like Joel Robinow (formerly of Drunk Horse) on keyboards and horns, but the leitmotif is still that strange mixture between Californian lysergic trips, roots rock, and a jam-heavy crossover attitude. The liquid electric piano concluding a track shouted in a Creedence-like manner, "Calling Lighting pt. 2", evokes Morrisonian riders on the storm cast into this world like a dog without a bone. The strange crossover embraced by Miller with the new lineup is evident in songs like "El Rey", pure cotton candy that envelops us with those guitar chords and the backdrop of organ and electric piano accompanying Ethan's falsetto along a track that expands into a strange Blaxploitation beat. The same insert of "Dancers at the end of time", between "explosions" of wah-wah guitars and keyboards on a rhythmic carpet from a fire-lit Indian dance, is extremely engaging as it's associated with Miller's vocal performance, which shreds the paper in the tweeters of the old acoustic speakers (highly recommended for this music).

 Otherwise, "Lord Have Mercy" shifts the disorienting effect towards the choral paeans aimed at the sky by the unknown southern rock bands of the nineties, like The Screamin' Cheetah Wheelies, with hands raised towards the refreshing rain invoked after months of drought in that desert commune where it's hard to believe marijuana and polygamy are illegal stuff, that vinyl has been replaced by CDs, and the rock stars of the past now play golf.

 The element of surprise is gone and this album is less wild and engaging than the previous one. But if Ethan Miller ends the album with a ballad ("Riverboat") in honor of the grateful dead as if it were played at the party of his funeral by flesh puppets dealing with a plate of "huevos", then he will always have a special place in my heart.