Jesse Malin - Glitter In The Gutter (One Little Indian)
3/5
By: Alex Lee Thomson
Half of you wants to believe this is the great American cross over album that we've been waiting for since Willy Masons' 'Where The Humans Eat', the other half knows it's Tom Petty doing Ryan Adams up the wrong-'un with a truncheon... and the pain is, you don't know if that's a good thing or not. Cut the originality of it and you're left with an album that's as fun as Jet's first effort (which was fun) and a rather catchy take on modern Americana country pop-rock.
It's lively, enjoyable and comprehensively decent to listen to and if you can get over the dodgy R.Adams impression you can even lose yourself in the vocals. Lyrically, it's all you'd want from alt-country; forlorn ballads about leaving home, going home, meeting people from your home town... and, rock 'n' roll of course. In fact if you were to compare the words to anybody else living it would have to be Jackson Browne, with all the same harmonic despondency you'd associate with the 'Running On Empty' songsmith. When you start looking for comparisons like that you start to find them all over the place comparing 'Prisoners OF Paradise' to the likes of Bob Seger and, what the heck, the glory tracks of Bruce Springsteen (who guests on the LP, in fact).
The problem is though it's kind of like a cartoon of all the aforementioned, and this album is a good 20 years behind them all. Where it pulls back a bit, gaining a little more ground than the albums influences, is in the guitars and generally more present-punk compositions that songs like 'Black Haired Girl' exude with Blink-like bass lines, though this song has probably the worst lyrics of the album covering every cliché in the book of 'things to say to tell everybody you're from America'.
'In The Gutter' is a faultlessly great album for people wanting to experiment with Americana for the first time and is massively more important than the second Jet offering, but people already familiar with artists like Ryan Adams and Bright Eyes will only find poor cover attempts at a genre already struggling to make a good image for itself within the UK. We can imagine the Americans going ape-sh*t for this album, and this guys fairly rock 'n' roll voice that at times becomes fervently gorgeous, but to us humble Brits this might be one apple pie too many. If you've never tried on the old size nines of Neil Young and the like, give this bluesy power chord onslaught a tickle - but don't say we didn't warn you if its just a tad too... creamy.
Stream four tracks from 'Glitter From The Gutter' HERE.
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