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Album Review
by SashaS
16-2-2004
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| Alabama 3: Last Train to Sanityville, UK |
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Alabama 3: 'Last Train To Mashville'
(One Little Indian)
Slipped Disc #18: Alabama 3 or ante-penultimate in our series
If you like blues, the kind from the Deep South, full of pathos, pain and catharsis, as melancholy as British climate used to be, you are in the right spot. Blues that had several bastard children of different complexion, such as Rock’n’Roll and the Urban genres? Well, sitting in own deep south… of London (Wimbledon), we re-indulge in a listening pleasure provided by a nearby [well, 10 miles is round the corner in this getting-ever-bigger urban sprawl] residents, Alabama 3.
A son of a Welsh Mormon preacher-man and an offspring of a Glaswegian trade unionist, met in Brixton and discovered love for blues, mixed with gospel desires and acid-house/club culture. The mix has been delighting over a number of albums and shows where unimaginable is expected to happen and usually does. And on many fronts, be it mainstream [the opening track of this album’s provided theme-tune to the neurotic Mafiosa series ‘The Sopranos’] to being well-respected in the underground-include fandom…
But, this time we go stripped… ‘Last Train To Mashville’ is a collection of acoustic versions of the best (known) Alabama 3 tracks that keep it simple but not less magnetic, hypnotic, and delightful. All their greatest goodies are present and accounted for: ‘Woke Up This Morning’, ‘Too Sick To Pray’, ‘We Don’t Dance To Tekno Anymore’, ‘Disneyland Is Burning’, ‘Woody Guthrie’, ’Peace In The Valley’…
Each and every version here is a gem of alternative promotions that touches all the parts the blues is expected to with modern undertones and current political awareness. Alabama 3 are named after a black man (wrongly) accused and executed for rape in America’s Deep South of the 1930s and have been seeking justice, ever since.
It has come in the validation form of performing, with 26-piece orchestra on The Jay Leno Show to 25 million Americans, ‘Woke Up This Morning’. Still, Larry Love once said that “a nostalgic notion of the empowering ability of underground culture” was what drove them and it is still the case. It is so good to have a band like this that can drop thinking-person’s dance music as well as blues so low in the dumps, it hurts your toenails.
The band’s biography designates them as “A crew of miscreant, theo-pharmacological, neo-situationists, holy music junkies floating high in the anaemic river of mass entertainment”, but ‘Last Train’ is the other side of the coin: the melodic, the hurting, the darker, the knowing, the soul-aching cure.
Peace among urbanites.
9/10
SashaS
16-2-2004
Alabama’s album ‘The Last Train To Mashville Vol 2’ is available now on One Little Indian
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