Genre: Rock
Rate: 320 kbps CBR / 44100
Time: 00:52:22
Size: 119,74 MB
The Cody Dickinson-led Hill Country Revue establishes itself as more than just a marking-time offshoot of Dickinson's more well-known North Mississippi Allstars with a strong second album for national indie Razor & Tie.
Initially partnering with hill-country blues stalwart Garry Burnside and Beale Street hotshot Kirk Smithhart, the younger Dickinson's band began as something of an alternate take on the Allstars' sound. But then Burnside stepped back (he remains a non-touring member), Dickinson gave up the drums for guitar (and his trademark electric washboard), and Michigan-based singer Daniel Robert Coburn came aboard as lead singer.
These moves transformed Hill Country Revue into a heavier, more aggressive band, balancing the hill-country blues base with a stronger brand of Southern rock. And though the nimbleness of the elder Dickinson's guitar playing was sometimes missed, Coburn proved to be a stronger, more soulful singer on the band's debut, Make a Move.
Zebra Ranch, named after the Coldwater, Mississippi, recording studio of Dickinson's late father Jim Dickinson, where both of the band's albums have been crafted, pushes this evolution further. Where Burnside wrote or co-wrote seven of the first album's 10 songs, here he contributes to four of 14. Instead, Dickinson has taken the primary songwriting role, writing or co-writing half the songs, and both Coburn and Smithhart take on larger roles. The band also moves further away from the North Mississippi Allstars template with the departure of bassist Chris Chew, replaced by Doc Samba. (Young Memphis music veteran David Mason is also new on drums.)
The result is an expansion of the first album's classic-rock influence. The blues base is still there -- witness Smithhart weaving a hypnotic hill-country riff into the otherwise more straightforwardly rock "Bottom $" or the classic-sounding hill-country groove on the Burnside/Dickinson collaboration "My Baby Don't Know" or the genre-affirming anthem "Hill Country." But many of the album's strongest songs stray further afield from that style. "Chalk It Up," co-written by Coburn and Dickinson, sounds like it could be a soulful radio-rock hit from the early '70s. And "Idyll," Dickinson's tribute to his native Mississippi landscape, is not the most incisive lyric you'll ever hear but has an easygoing yet gritty quality. The band hammers home both the album's rock-oriented expansion and personal motivations with an album-closing cover of the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses," the original of which featured Dickinson's dad. (Chris Herrington)
Tracklist:
01 - Raise Your Right Hand 03:14
02 - Chalk It Up 03:14
03 - Going Down 03:57
04 - Bottom $ 03:38
05 - Zebra Ranch 03:47
06 - Where You Belong 04:02
07 - You Hold My Woman 04:01
08 - My Baby Don't Know 03:57
09 - Hill Country 04:35
10 - Second Street 02:48
11 - Do Work 02:24
12 - Idyll 04:28
13 - I Don't Know About You 03:34
14 - Wild Horses 04:43
Hill Country Revue here:
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