Chuck Prophet: No Other Love : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Pulling from the funk zone ("Summertime Thing"), sophisticated soul music ("No Other Love") and the kind of fat, greasy blues you can make a meal on ("What Can You Tell Me") singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet nails together a sonic hybrid of urban and rural America on his self-produced sixth album. Since his days with psychedelic brown dirt cowboys Green on Red through his Nineties work fronting his band, Prophet's made sideways soulful and bluesy rock and roll his business. More than country-fried licks slapped on top of slam-dunk rock, Prophet's American sights and sounds are fed through a compassionate lens. Straight-up melodies are filled-in and skewed by surprises like farfisa, sitar and strings, as Prophet turns the dusties and undesirables into shiny jewels. Stories of little criminals unknown legends and waste-cases (and sometimes all three, as in "I Bow Down and Pray to Every Woman I See") are firefly-electric in their naturalness. Combine that with a dirty rock & roll vocal and that whalloping guitar, and you've got an undeniably American mix of stuff that's easily digested but still dangerous. Like donuts -- the subject of the album's opening salvo -- what's not to like?

DENISE SULLIVAN
(June 18, 2002)

(DENISE SULLIVAN)