Bloodkin, Baby, They Told Us We Would Rise Again: Opening track "The Viper" is good, lumbering contemporary Southern rock, but is a seven-and-a-half minute power ballad really the way to start an album? (Still two minutes left, and the guitars are already going all "Freebird.") Drive-By Truckers are an obvious influence, maybe a little too much (Bloodkin's from Athens and Patterson Hood wrote the liner notes), but they've absorbed Skynyrd, too, and there's a little (lot) late-model 38 Special on "Wait Forever." Very good performances all around, in fact--I should have gone to see them when they opened for DBT last month--but the songs are maybe a little too self-consciously epic and magesterial.
A.A. Bondy, American Hearts: Gloomy alt-folk ex-alt-rock guy with a passing vocal resemblance to Steve Earle. Well done--simple minor-key strums, gruff but polished singing, atmospheric embellishments (organ, reverb guitar)--but a little silly with the Southern Gothic thing. So serious and poetic.
A.A. Bondy, American Hearts: Gloomy alt-folk ex-alt-rock guy with a passing vocal resemblance to Steve Earle. Well done--simple minor-key strums, gruff but polished singing, atmospheric embellishments (organ, reverb guitar)--but a little silly with the Southern Gothic thing. So serious and poetic.
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