HERALD NIX
Soul Of A Kiss
Northern Electric/Maximum
· Put your feet up on the railing and sit a spell.
It doesn’t feel quite right to be listening to Canadian alt-country stalwart Herald Nix’s latest album on a snowy December afternoon. Soul Of A Kiss really feels like porch music – like Nix and his colleagues (including occasional Calgarian Ronnie Hayward on bass) are sitting together in front of a big old house on a summer evening making simple rootsy, folky, bluesy music.
They’re skilled musicians, but they’re not worried about elaborate arrangements or fancy licks – heck, a lot of the time, they’re just riffing on one or two chords. Nix pulls out his slide and his harmonica every once in awhile and blueses things up a notch. His singing is most often gentle, but occasionally (like on "Love Looks Good on You") he belts out a lyric aimed at some trees off in the distance, giving them his first-person perspectives on relationships or his distillation of a memorable image (like "The Leland Hotel Fire," or the woman up late cooking and cleaning in "Patti’s Work Song").
On second thought, if it’s making me think about summer, maybe now is the perfect time to be listening to this album.
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