Chris Smither: Drive You Home Again : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Corey Harris
Greens From the Garden
Alligator
1999

Kevin Coyne
Sugar Candy Taxi
Ruf
1999

Issued last year, these three views of the blues are still lush with living color. Greens From the Garden, Corey Harris' third album, is a rainbow unto itself, from the silvery plunk of his National steel guitar and the brown-dirt honesty of his singing to the scuffed-gold horns (members of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band) blowing behind him in "Congo Square Rag." As a bluesman, Harris walks the same winding road as Taj Mahal, drawing from the multiple traditions and hard truths of American black experience. The dark sorrow of drug abuse and urban gunfire haunts the frisky rhythm of "Basehead" and the voodoo-calypso gait of "Wild West." But from that juxtaposition, Harris fashions both great entertainment and strong revelation. Greens From the Garden is a big meal - but all natural.

Singer-songwriter Chris Smither is also the highway kind, always on the go between lapsed commitment and redemptive truce. On Drive You Home Again, his eighth album, Smither's stoic reflection and foxy wit are bathed in the flickering glow of passing headlights and neon bar signs. And Smither's roots are as blue as they come. There is plenty of misty Louisiana and Lightnin' Hopkins in Smither's weathered singing and unhurried picking on "Drive You Home Again" and "No Love Today." Smither never fakes the hurt, either, as you'll hear in "So Long": "The steady hand that every beggar holds his bowl in/Was what we took for steady rollin'/For so long/But now I'm gone/So long." So fine.

British expatriate Kevin Coyne (now a resident of Germany) is a peculiar blues singer, even by relaxed standards. Since the late 1960s, Coyne has forged a unique path in folk blues: interior monologues of pain and giddy delusion, the extremes of everyday neurosis made flesh in his chesty yowl. Sugar Candy Taxi attests to his undiminished powers. Coyne's wounded courage and dry comic touch in "Rusting Away," "Almost Dying" and the self-mocking "Happy Little Fat Man" are not quite the blues in name but definitely so in feeling. (RS 833)

DAVID FRICKE