May 25, 2011

Album Review: Seasick Steve - 'You Can't Teach An Old Dog New Tricks'

The album title speaks for itself, much of the same from Steve's dreary blues drone.

3 / 10 Seasick Steve’s deification with the Jools Holland set circa 2007 was helped by his heavy novelty factor: a bearded faux-bo (and, er, one-time Modest Mouse producer) of pensionable age playing bare-bones blues-rock. Four years on, his fifth album just feels stodgily generic; even with Led Zep’s John Paul Jones on mandolin, this could be by any unheralded stonewash denim-wearer in any pub backroom.

That said, if you find Steve’s corn-fed sentiments and visible-from-space rhyme schemes a bit naff, just listen to ‘Whiskey Ballad’ – written by his son Paul, it’s so inane that dad’s doggerel will read like the most complex of moral philosophy by contrast.

Noel Gardner

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6.3

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