Title: Ingenious and effective...
Product review: The idea behind this intriguing album is to combine original vocal recordings from the 40's & 50's with "up to date" blues/hip-hop arrangements. A recipe for disaster? Fortunately not... rather an atmospheric and exciting remix that successfully marries the raw power of these "true blues" singers with sympathetically structured backing tracks. The end effect? Well, the problem with a lot of old blues recordings is their thin and often rudimentary instrumentation that adds little to the emotion of the vocals - by placing them in a more complex and much richer framework, Lomax adds to their power rather than abusing it. Clever and, with only a few exceptions, highly effective. But, like many of these strange marriages, better not to analyse it too much and to take what's on offer at face value... quite simply one of the best "modern" blues albums of recent years.
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