Originally posted by twangirl:
Originally posted by The Artist Formerly Known As grotty:
...putting this on:
Chris Whitley & Jeff Lang
<img src="http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/B000H8SDZY.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_V45286476_.jpg" alt=" - " />
Tell me about this, Grotty. How is it? [/b]
After spending a night listening - I'm thinking it is excellent. Didn't know much about Jeff Lang prior but he's a good complement to Chris. There are stunning songs on here - things that rank with CW's best. It sounds most like his more recent: Hotel Lost Horizon/Soft Dangerous Shores/War Crime Blues.
Here's some more detail & reviews I could find:
Sydney Morning Herald Over the years I have probably heard 40 or 50 versions of Stagger Lee, but I have never heard it sung with such a depth and intensity as the blistering version on this remarkable record. If you buy only one blues-roots album this year, this is the one.
The gigantic, emotion-drenched talent of the late Chris Whitley mixed with some exceptional playing from Jeff Lang, our finest blues guitarist, and stripped-to-the-bone accompaniment from drummer Ashley Davies and upright bass player Grant Cummerford, make this a roots masterpiece.
It's not the way these musicians take Stagger Lee and find new depths of meaning in it. It is the rawness and savagely beautiful guitar attack of Twelve Thousand Miles, and their loping and seductive version of Dylan's When I Paint My Masterpiece.
There is not a bad track on this album, which sounds as though it will jump out of the speakers and grab you by the throat.
Amazon.com The late Chris Whitley plainly found a kindred spirit in Australia's Jeff Lang, with whom he collaborated on his last recording before his 2005 death. Both are breathy vocalists and bluesy adventurers who favor a buzzsaw immediacy to more layered, polished recordings. With Whitley playing mainly National steel guitar and Lang alternating among lap steel and other guitars, backed by a crack rhythm section, the music has a haunted, sin-drenched quality that ranks with Whitley's most intense. Highlights range from the tribal-throb rendition of Prince's "Forever in My Life" and the Asian delicacy of Lang's acoustic "Ravenswood" to the Dylanesque phrasing of Whitley's "Velocity Girl" and a pair of Dylan covers ("When I Paint My Masterpiece" and "Changing of the Guard"). The opening "Stagger Lee" and the closing "Hellhound on My Trail" (an unlisted bonus cut) show where this music is rooted, while Whitley's "Rocket House" and the supercharged "Underground" show where it can soar.
Dislocation Blues Stylus Magazine
