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LIVE! IN EUROPE
(davidlindley.com)
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A blend of beauty and weirdness, this collaboration between slide-guitar specialist Lindley and drummer Ingram ricochets from Professor Longhair ("Her Mind Is Gone") to Arabic melodies ("Meti’s Reel") to perverse humor (Lindley’s fatty’s lament "When a Guy Gets Boobs") without a hitch. That’s largely due to their warm, seemingly effortless playing. Ingram has an insouciant style akin to the relaxed way Lindley approaches his explorations of open tunings. "Well Well Well" is particularly entrancing: the long instrumental introduction begins with crisp ringing notes that split the difference between the tones of an African kora and the Mississippi hill-country guitar of the late Junior Kimbrough, then darts off toward the Middle East before Lindley’s vocal begins, tugging the song back north and west toward Ireland. They deliver Jerry Lee Lewis’s dirty double-entendre classic "The Meatman" as a straight blues, but their Gypsy instincts can’t be long curbed. "Catfood Sandwiches," a Lindley tune about bad backstage food, starts with stately major chords that give it a gospel feel and then hits the road, swinging to a reggae beat. That anything-goes mentality is what makes Lindley’s live performances so entertaining, and it’s captured credibly on this disc, which is — like all his recent recordings — available only via his Web site.
