As can only be expected from the elusive Blood, this second lap around future blues (the first took place at Sun Studios, documented on 2001's Memphis Blood)
sits confidently at the crossroads of rough and slick, weird and conventional,
the roadhouse and the House of Blues. Taskmaster Vernon Reid and his charge honor
the greats (Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters) and the obscures (Mary
Lou Reed, Eddy H. Owens) while inserting various oddities to make each nugget
their own, all without a single showboating or confrontational moment within
earshot. One set of categories it neglects to confound, though, is foreground
and background, which means this album changes colors depending on where it gets
placed in your lifestream. And not in any predictable way, either. As the soundtrack
to your daily grind, it can sound like the band's scraping the bottom of the
barrelhouse one moment and painting by numbers on the summer festival circuit
the next. Pay closer attention, and the wheezing organ over Johnny Copeland's "Ghetto Child" or the tap dancing (?) on Jimmy Reed's "Bright Lights, Big City" will hit you as alternately uncompromising and trad, if not downright hokey. Really, then, this is just another way of acknowledging that Ulmer wouldn't dream of escaping from the blues at this point. No matter how head-scratching things get, he willfully imprisons himself within the form. Only problem is, the exact same can be said of Charley Patton, leading one to recall that Ulmer's blues was a lot more future on Odyssey back in 1983. By the time he gets to Muscle Shoals, the problem of distinguishing one album from the next will hopefully be staring him down.
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