 | LonsterRag Reviews. |
Freddy Moore, Allen Galles and Dennis Peters
have been playing together in some way shape or from since 1971. I
knew them in the early seventies, then pretty much lost track of
them after they left the Twin Cities and moved to Los Angeles.
Occasionally I’d hear rumors of new bands and near misses in their
grab at the brass ring.
“Those guys were great,” I’d think. “Too bad they never made
it.” Then, one day in
the next century, 'Source Mississippi , General Records’s second release by
The Kat Club shows up in my mailbox.
It’s about time. When I listen to The Kat Club’s ' Source Mississippi,' I hear the sound of musicians who have played together for over thirty years- through thick and thin- mostly thin, I’d guess- and how rare is that? I hear the diverse sounds of many strains of popular music streamed through seasoned and imaginative minds. It’s tempting to say something like, “If the Band and Steely Dan, were, for some reason, stranded outdoors during an electrical storm while listening to late-period Miles Davis…” but citing such specific sources is misleading, as one might think The Kat Club “sounds like” a particular influence. They don’t. It’s more like this: If you grew up with a transistor radio under your pillow at night, listening to far away a.m. radio, hoping some station in, say, Little Rock, would play a record that you hadn’t heard yet, and then you finally got an electric guitar one Christmas, played in a band, wrote songs, devoted your life to your music and your band, lived through the British Invasion, jazz rock, glam, southern rock, Memphis soul, disco, funk, blues, boogie, thirteen or fourteen other blues-styles offshoots, new-wave, techno, Chicago soul, Americana, and countless other genres, trends and styles (some fondly recalled, some best forgotten), got chewed up and spit out by the music business and you still got excited by the prospect of drawing inspiration from your musical memory and heritage to create new sounds, and now, maybe for the first time, you’re recording just because you want to hear what it sounds like… well, you might make an album like this. To my ears the influences of so many strains of popular music have been assimilated fully, so they come out as a mature, original sound. Simultaneously respecting the sources, while creating something fresh. Thirty years lead to fifteen tracks. There’s the Big Beat of “World We Live In,” the inspired stories of “Great Relationship,” and “Highway 81,” and soulful ballads like “Big Bad Love,” and “True and Trusted.” Give it a listen. It will leave you wanting more.
St. Paul, Minnesota (just east of the Mississippi River)
Strickland: About the songs….
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