Album:
No Paid Holidays
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 51:35
Size: 118.1 MB
Styles: Electric country blues
Year: 2008
Art: Front
[2:18] 1. Blues For Howard
[4:28] 2. Archetypal Blues No. 2
[4:55] 3. Call My Job
[4:01] 4. Dad In The Distance
[2:42] 5. You're The One I Need
[3:47] 6. Bubba's Blues
[4:34] 7. And When I Die
[3:42] 8. Into The Sunset
[2:39] 9. Gearzy's Boogie
[4:12] 10. This Traveling Life
[2:36] 11. Max The Baseball Clown
[3:02] 12. The Bloody Burmese Blues
[3:38] 13. I've Got A Toothache
[4:56] 14. Everybody's Down On Me
Watermelon Slim has a fresh contemporary vision of country blues, a personal one that still allows listeners to feel right at home, and while he hasn't varied his approach too much over the course of his past couple of albums (No Paid Holidays is his third release for Northern Blues), what he does fits and works so well that that's undoubtedly a good thing. Here he hits his usual touchstones, pounding out a couple of full-tilt blues-rockers, shining on slide guitar, stripping things down on occasion for one of his unique "hollers." There aren't really any surprises, but again, that's fine. Well, actually, hearing Slim's stripped-down harmonica version of Laura Nyro's "And When I Die" is a bit of a surprise, and a delight at that. Also a delight is the slide guitar bonanza of "Bubba's Blues," which features guest slide guitarist Lee Roy Parnell and Slim tearing the rafters down. Slim's sharp narrative sense emerges on "Max the Baseball Clown," which conjures long-ago boyhood summers while the opener, "Blues for Howard," contains the remarkable line "You can't stay neutral on a moving train." The blues is such a conservative genre in so many ways, depending on familiar progressions and purposely clichéd sentiment to convey universal emotions. Watermelon Slim manages to work within that framework and still somehow make it all seem hushed and personal, even intimate. It's not an easy line to walk, but he does it as well as anyone currently on the contemporary blues scene. No Paid Holidays may not cut into any new territory, but it doesn't really have to because what this guy does is wonderfully solid right where it is. ~Steve Leggett
No Paid Holidays mc
No Paid Holidays zippy
Album:
The Wheel Man
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 47:05
Size: 107.8 MB
Styles: Electric country blues
Year: 2007
Art: Front
[4:20] 1. The Wheel Man
[2:52] 2. I've Got News
[4:09] 3. Black Water
[2:55] 4. Jimmy Bell
[5:55] 5. Newspaper Reporter
[2:15] 6. Drinking & Driving
[3:20] 7. Fast Eddie
[2:46] 8. Sawmill Holler
[2:50] 9. Truck Driving Mama
[2:21] 10. I Know One
[3:01] 11. Got Love If You Want It
[3:18] 12. Rattlesnake
[3:34] 13. Peaches
[3:23] 14. Judge Harsh Blues
Watermelon Slim – Vocals, Harp, dobro slide guitar, percussion, co-producer; Michael Newberry- Drums, backing vocals, percussion, song arrangements; Cliff Belcher- Electric Bass, backing vocals; Ronnie “Mack” McMullen – Electric guitar, backing vocals; Ike Lamb- Electric guitar.
The blues has always been an enigma. A music that expresses deeply personal emotions, it does so with a well-worn collection of repeated phrases, rhymes, and floating verses that are nothing short of community property. It is also a music of constriction, with a conservative set of stock progressions and riffs that make innovations to the genre extremely difficult. The resulting familiarity of all of this is what makes the blues what it is, personal yet general, individual yet communally held, a music that if it were any more blue collar it would be the deep blue sea itself. How on earth does one bring something fresh to this genre in the 21st century without tipping the whole cart over on its side? Bill Homans, or Watermelon Slim, as he is known these days, seems to have found an answer by looking backward all the way to the field holler and looking over sideways to country music, rolling it all up into a smart synthesis that sounds fresh and sharp even though it is only a half-step removed from the sounds of Charley Patton or Jimmie Rodgers. The Wheel Man, Slim's second album for the Northern Blues imprint following 2006's magnificent Watermelon Slim & the Workers, isn't as striking as the previous offering, mainly because it is cut from the same exact cloth, but it also isn't a fall off, either, and the two releases taken together make a seamless arc. A former truck driver who just happens to own several university degrees and is a member of MENSA, Slim is his own walking enigma, and he manages to tread the line amazingly between what is blue collar and what is blues academia again on this album, beginning with the lead and title track, a duet with Magic Slim (do two Slims make for one Extra Large?) on the dilemma of making a sane life out of long-haul trucking, which itself becomes a blues metaphor for steering through life. "Sawmill Holler" is just that, a work holler that is both a cathartic release and a way to focus in on the tasks at hand. The harmonica and foot-stomp-driven "Jimmy Bell" is old-fashioned storytelling done without any fancy modern recording tricks. There are a pair of impressive blues covers here, too, an Okie rendition of Slim Harpo's "Got Love If You Want It" and a solo acoustic take on Furry Lewis' "Judge Harsh Blues." But it is Slim's Oklahoma twang that binds everything together, and it reminds that there was a time when the blues and country music drank side by side from the same river. Two of the best songs here, the wise, humorous, and carefully subtle "Drinking & Driving" and the raggedly stomping "Rattlesnake," could be all over country radio if the people who programmed that stuff really had a clue to what real country music is. Jimmie Rodgers (who never gets played on country radio -- even though without Rodgers the format might not even exist) was the singing brakeman who loved the blues, and Watermelon Slim, the singing truck driver who also loves the blues, seem cut from the same cultural remnants. Slim's smart enough to know it, too. Which is fine. He drives that truck well. ~Steve Leggett
The Wheel Man mc
The Wheel Man zippy