FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

CD Reviews by Jaime Frederick R.L. BURNSIDE Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down Fat Possum/ Epitaph VARIOUS ARTISTS New Beats From the Delta Fat Possum/ Epitaph · Two new releases from raw, cutting-edge blues label, Fat Possum · Burnside’s disc benefits from collaborations with members of Beck’s band, while the New Beats disc attempts some equally interesting hybridizations with less successful results At 73, R. L. Burnside’s grip on the throat of the blues is as tight as ever. He’s been messing with his raw, juke-joint style for more than 30 years and following his foray into electronic loops on 1998’s Come On In, Burnside has gone one step further with his latest, Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down. With the help of Beck regulars Smokey Hormel and DJ Swamp, Burnside has scratched his sound into the surface of a new century, while remaining true to his traditional Mississippi hill-country roots. Coming on with the deep soul of a modern day Otis Rush, Burnside delivers tracks like "Hard Time Killing Floor" and "Bad Luck City" that rattle with the experience of those 73 hard-fought years. Burnside also dips into the vaults for a duet with a sampled Aretha Franklin on a new version of the Don Covay hit, "Chain of Fools" and heads straight for the hills on the predominantly acoustic mandolin blues, "My Eyes Keep Me in Trouble." It’s an imaginative album, unbound by the kind of staunch traditionalism afflicting so many of Burnside’s twelve-bar contemporaries – his effortless importation of new styles and willingness to experiment make him a genuinely interesting figure on the face of contemporary blues music. His Mississippi brethren haven’t been so fortunate. New Beats From the Delta attempts to marry some of the roughest edges in blues, like those of Burnside’s label-mates T-Model Ford and the late Junior Kimbrough, with the gritty urban sounds of gangsta rap, but these remixes sound a lot less urgent than the originals. Maybe this is just a matter of taste, but while the manipulations by Organized Noize, Go Gittas Camp and Big Oomp are interesting as an experiment, they lack the raw gut bucket emotionalism of the Delta blues they’re sampling. Shrive Alive almost hit with their remixes of Cedell Davis’s "Baby, I Love You So" and Ford’s "If I Had Wings" but that’s only because they leave so much of those artists’ gruff, clangy yearning intact. Kudos to Fat Possum for trying to bridge the genres and bring their music to a new crew of listeners, but I’ll take Asie Payton and Johnny Farmer straight up without the distortion of all the beats, loops, and hardcore raps, thanks. BURNSIDE 5/5 NEW BEATS 3/5

| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |