FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
G. LOVE & SPECIAL SAUCE
Yeah, It's That Easy
Epic/OKeh· Third album from the Harry Connick Jr. of blues hip hop.
· More of the same from this Philadelphia storyteller.
Rock 'n' roll is a melting pot into which the bastard children of American folk music, the blues and popular music have traditionally bled and blended. On this, his third album, G. Love shows that his melting pot is never full; where other artists may have been content to pay homage to icons Bob Dylan and John Hammond Jr. through topical lyrics and blues harmonica, G. Love adds the rap-around shadow of rhythms from the '80s hip hop brigade.
Flanked by a percussionist and an acoustic bass player who comprise Special Sauce, G. Love squeezes out songs that could have jauntily followed a Sly and the Family Stone tune across the FM waves of the mid-'70s. Just as the freeways of America seem to come from each corner to meet in G. Love's hometown, Philadelphia, so do the band's chosen genres of music stretch from several corners of American musical history to unite on this album, although at times the union meets at odd angles.
The lyrical content varies from a narrative about a female cop who is killed in a bank heist while her children wait at school for her, to mental reflections while watching a friend dissolve into drug abuse, to the usual whining about - you guessed it - love, sex and relationships. It is often interesting stuff, but there are few spiderweb threads of poetry and phrasing that really dangle from the listener's ear. More than a few harmonies and hooks, however, do.
Adventurers in the musical landscape occasionally go astray, but even if they don't quite make it to where they were going, the journey can still be interesting.
3 out of 5
Mary-Lynn McEwen
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