When you listen for the first time to Mick Rhodes’ new album ‘Til I am dust’, you have the impression it is filled with pretty straightforward music, rooted in genres we are used to identify by some vague terms like Americana, Heartland rock, terms that are in fact used to characterize a lot of different musical styles. But when you listen to the album a second time, more carefully, you realize it is much more complex and multi-faceted than you would had thought.
The songs are varied from the Heartland rock flavor of the triumphant and sunny ‘Back to the 909’, as if the Kinks had gone a little bit Americana, yeah ‘Sunny afternoon’ turned into ‘With sunshine all the time’, it may be one of my favorite of the album.
Overall, the sound is West Coast and Texas at the same time, as there is a clear honky-tonk feeling on ‘It’s too late’ or ‘Til I am dust’, like a production of ex-LA resident, country songwriter Mike Stinson.
Several songs like ‘Sapulpa’ with its wall of guitar sound will remind you the work of Tom Petty because of the likeness of the vocal delivery, whereas the running strong and boogie-like ‘Rainbows’, will appear as a much poppier song than the others, especially on the ‘make you smile’ line.
And if Mick Rhodes has a different vocal tonality than the high tenor voice of David Hidalgo, ‘Brown and Blue’ has these spacey and strong beats mixed with string arrangements of some of the more stirring Los Lobos’ tracks. The same influence could be evoked for ‘I Shoulda Just Danced With You’ whose texture is balanced between a harmonica, a piano organ and vocal harmonies, but you may just also feel some kind of Creedence Clearwater Revival savor all over it.
The piano organ and the vocal harmonies on ‘Vital Love’, or the fast rocking cadence of ‘All Right’ which skips a beat when the chorus ‘Everything is all right’ comes, or the graceful ‘Harder now’ with its delicate vocal harmonious hook, or even the bluesy and tough sounding ‘Kiss me twice’ are all part of these different musical facets of this album I was talking about.
The album closes with a pretty tight cover of the Replacements ‘Waitress in the sky’, brighter and rootsier than the original. Since the Replacements are anything but a country band, the identification of the genres is even fuzzier. When I uploaded the CD, that Mick Rhodes kindly sent to me, in my iTunes library, the genre column got filled by the plain term ‘rock’! I suppose it is better to keep it simple, most of the album would not qualified as ‘country’ anyway, but rather it fluidly explores many aspects of its landscape with perfectly executed 13 tracks.