Title: It's a concept album, but it works
Review: Be warned-- this is a weird album that can only come from the disturbed mind of someone like James Blood Ulmer. It is, as the title suggests, just Blood's guitar with a string quartet to back him, although the quartet plays more than just a rhythm section role in the music. On Odyssey (possibly Blood's best-- I actually prefer it to Tales of Captain Black, so pick it up if you can find it), Ulmer proved that a guitar and a violin can not only peacefully coexist, but work oddly well together. This album is far different from Odyssey, though, in that there is no distortion of the sound of the string quartet. It actually sounds in several places like a classical album, but every time it begins to do so, Blood's guitar comes in like in an old call-and-response blues piece, echoing what the quartet has played, but in harmolodics. It is weird, but strangely, it works.
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