GREG TROOPER
Make It Through This World
Sugar Hill Records
· Songwriter goes south for an album likely to appeal to fans of Nick Lowe or John Hiatt.
Displaced by crunk, soul music threatens to disappear from the southern United States, raising the question of where it might resurface and what more can be said with the form. Greg Trooper is a New Jersey-born songwriter and, although Make It Through This World is his seventh album, his ruminative songs and sleepy delivery suggest he would have been perfectly suited as a backroom songwriter or soul sideman in the 1960s. To that point, Trooper employs Dan Penn – the songwriter behind "When a Man Loves a Woman" and resourceful good old boy – as producer.
Both Trooper and Penn know soul music shares a storytelling nature with country and western, also endangered in its original form, and what separates it from trendy revisions like neo-soul is a predisposition to go back to church. If Trooper occasionally coasts – "No Higher Ground" is little more than sweet backing behind the age-old weather metaphor and "Sad Sad Girl" suggests he ought to meet some different women – he redeems himself on "Close To the Tracks," rising above train imagery to earn comparisons to Lucinda Williams. "Lonely Pair" describes mature commiseration and the songwriter in Trooper makes a smart leap by addressing it to a former heartbreaker. Upright bass and that necessary gospel touch make the song the highlight of a satisfying album.
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