North Mississippi Allstars: Polaris : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Hard-driving blues foursome gets a little too caught up in the jam on their first two albums, these guys -- led by brothers Cody and Luther Dickinson, who both sing and play drums and guitar, respectively -- would open a vein and bleed all over a crunching riff in some voodoo religious rite that hearkened all the great ancestral blues spirits of northern Mississippi. Their third album, Polaris, doesn't do that. It is immersed not in blood but jam. Not that the songs go on forever; twelve in forty-five minutes won't tax your attention span. But the blues spirits have departed -- despite the addition of R.L. Burnside's son DeWayne on guitar -- and we have a Widespread/Allman/Dead/Phish vibe in their place, meaning the arrangements can get complicated as the musicians challenge one another in search of a wow. And there are some solid wows here as they careen into psychedelia and jazz, determined that no one be allowed to zone out in a long groove. There isn't much emotion, though, and just one song ("Never in All My Days") where they really throttle a riff. The problem may be in the lyrics, which don't add any wildly original ruminations on the behavior of one's baby, but the wows offer some compensation.

CHARLES M. YOUNG
(RS 931, September 18, 2003)