R.L. Burnside: Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In the new blues aesthetic coalescing around R.L. Burnside, the old reliable twelve-bar form is molded into long, wailing vamps that are punctuated by DJ scratchings, then pushed through the filters and processors of electronic dance music. But it remains indelibly the blues: With the transfixing Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down, Burnside, the seventy-three-year-old wizard of the North Mississippi hill country, refines the approach of his 1998 loops-and-hollers experiment Come On In by playing down the supporting electronic collage and emphasizing his embittered turpentine voice. The songs follow typical woe-is-me story lines ("Nothin' Man" and "Got Messed Up" are accounts of trouble that just won't stop), and the guitars (some by occasional Beck and Tom Waits sideman Smokey Hormel) snap out repetitive riffage that's one step from cliche. But Burnside's singing has never been more compelling on record. When he folds his spoken-word recollections into odd proclamations (like "Too Many Ups"), then delivers a surprisingly vital cover of "Chain of Fools," he becomes the living embodiment of blues spirit, a torch carrier whose vision for the music puts tradition-mongering young blues students to shame. (RS 854)

TOM MOON