4/5
Review:
An enjoyable album
Bless him, you've got to love Bill Wyman, haven't you? He's just got that little self-mocking
twinkle in his musical eye most of the time which gives even rather ordinary
stuff an enjoyable edge and makes it very listenable. Ever since Si Si, Je Suis Un Rock Star I've
felt that I shouldn't like his output nearly as much as I do – but I do anyway.
Image and style aside, Wyman is actually a very good
musician. Here, he seems to be trying to
channel the spirit of JJ Cale most of the time: there's a laid-back feel to the
whole thing and he's adopted that mixture of singing and whispering which
characterised a lot of JJ's work. It's a
good tactic because Wyman's singing voice couldn't be described as great even
by the most charitable of critics. Here it's produced with a lot of
double-tracking which makes it even more JJ-like - so much so that it's
sometimes a bit of a shock to hear an English accent rather than an Oklahoma
drawl.
The band are good and the material is nice without being
anything special. There's a reasonable
variety of songs which are all fairly stripped back, and overall it's a very
decent effort with an amiable atmosphere rather than anything particularly
passionate or emotional. Bill Wyman has
produced an album of good quality material here which is very soundly played
and produced. It's not a classic by any
means, but then very few albums are. What
we have here is an enjoyable collection of decent songs, well performed and
produced. It's fun and a little bit
samey, but I can recommend it as an enjoyable listen.
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