Alejandro Escovedo: A Man Under The Influence : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It sounds more like a curse than a compliment to describe Alejandro Escovedo as one of rock's most underrated singer-songwriters. But it is a fact, underscored by the depths of melody and drama on A Man Under the Influence. A vital if obscured force since the late 1970s with the Nuns, Rank and File, and the True Believers, Escovedo brings his experience in punk and bejeweled-guitar jangle to bear on the poetic introspection of his solo records. Influence is his latest beauty to beg the question: What does it take to make this man a star? Musically, Escovedo is his own genre, a folk-blues classicist with a gritty, plaintive voice and an equal fondness for dirty boogie ("Castanets") and spectral balladry ("Wedding Day"). He is also a master of using strings to illuminate both melancholy and hot-rod rock. The frisky "Velvet Guitar" and "Follow You Down," a fragile pledge of love, each sound in their way like dream unions of the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet and John Cale's Paris 1919. Inside that dusty grandeur, Escovedo rolls out resonant tales of physical and emotional odyssey like the haunting opener, "Wave," inspired by his father's emigration as a youth from Mexico to the U.S.: "My cousin said we're gonna find the ones that left/A boy climbs aboard the train/Never to wave bye again." With this album, Escovedo's own pilgrimage out of the shadows continues - with power and elegance. (RS 867 - April 26, 2001)

DAVID FRICKE