Junior Kimbrough
Most Things Haven't Worked Out

David 'Junior' Kimbrough was born in Mississippi. As a child, he started playing the guitar and gradually refined his style, never really veering from mid-tempo rhythms and creating a sort of modal sound with a piercing tone. His music exudes the style of Southern blues, hard and swampy. His first recordings date back to 1966, but it took until 1992 to record his first album, "All Night Long."
This "Most Things Haven't Worked Out" from 1997 is his third album: dirty, brutal, direct, and essential.
An album that draws heavily from the delta blues tradition, yet at the same time is perhaps the most atypical blues album I know; everything revolves around a hypnotic motif, so much so that one might say it is without a resolution, it is a sort of hallucinatory journey that makes no stops. A record that seems made on the spot (a sort of jam) but at the same time seems to leave nothing to chance. Substantial and massive but at the same time dry and arid. It's archaic but also very modern. It seems played inside a box, but when you listen to it, you feel like traveling. In short, it is an album that blends opposites in a disconcerting way.
The track that opens the album is "Lonesome Road," a sinuous slow tune that could almost be called canonical, with hindsight, it seems that this beginning almost wants to deceive the listener, were it not for those reverberating and magnetic sounds, but already with "I'm In Love," the tone changes and the essence of the album I wrote about above emerges, and from here to the end, it will not leave us. The piece that gives the title to the album is an imaginative instrumental.
I must point out that the synergy between Kimbrough's own 6 strings and the second guitar of Kenny Brown is splendid, but also of a very high level are the energetic yet nuanced and brush-touched drumming of Kenny Malone and the burly bass of Gary Burnside (yes, the son of another who didn't dance around musically, namely R. L. Burnside).
Now, make it to the end, even if you are perhaps wondering where the hell I have taken you, because "I'm Leaving You Baby" is a truly daring piece of blues, just as the beginning was disconcerting for "tradition," the ending is equally so, but for the exact opposite (I said it's an album about opposites, and it is in every way).
Yes, dear Kimbrough, you gave us a truly important album, and even if during the journey most things didn't work out, it doesn't mean they were so wrong after all.