Jake Lear - Lost Time Blues

Bitrate:320K/s
Year:2009
Time:47:44 
Size:111,1 MB 
Label:Not On Label 
Styles:Blues/Modern Electric Blues 
Art:Front 

Tracks LIsting:
 1. Streets Of Michelangelo - 4:45
 2. Ragged And Dirty - 4:07
 3. Leave This Town - 2:56
 4. Muddy Water - 2:25
 5. Sure Gonna Miss You - 3:07
 6. Sometimes - 3:32
 7. Boogie Woogie Woman - 6:04
 8. Key To The Highway - 5:38
 9. Blues 3 Ways - 4:12
10. Lost Time Blues - 3:02
11. Bluebird - 7:50

The six vigorous rockers are the Lear-composed tracks of track 1, “Streets of Michaelangelo” (a Dylanesque title if there ever was one); track 3, “Leave This Town;” track 5, “Sure Gonna Miss You;” track 6, “Sometimes;” and track 9, the John Lee Hooker-like “Blues 3 Ways” (with, as the notes say, “[a]dditional lyrics…borrowed from Bob Dylan and Son House”). There’s also a sterling rock arrangement of Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway ”(track 8). If these don’t move you to the dance floor, you’re likely to be declared legally dead!
Acoustic guitar-driven folk-rock is expressed in track 2, Willie Brown’s “Ragged and Dirty (an old song most familiar in its Sleepy John Estes Rendition, “Broke and Hungry”), and the Lear-composed country-rockers “Muddy Water” (track 4, about a flood) and the philosophical screed, “Lost Time Blues” (track 10), with Lear’s guitar riffing joined by Brian O’Connell’s banjo. O’Connell plays gospel-inflected organ on the Otis Redding/Percy Sledge-inspired slow soul blues, “Boogie Woogie Woman,” a song great for holding your baby tight while you slow dance romantically. Another slow blues here is the last track, the pensive and lyrical “Bluebird” (both also Lear-composed).
O’Connell adds his organ talents to “Streets of Michaelangelo” as well, and Pete Ruttle plays somewhat Dylanesque harp on “Ragged and Dirty.” Jake Lear plays electric guitar on all tracks where he doesn’t play acoustic, and his electric solos are excellent, tasty, wonderfully understated, and, even though long, with several songs featuring two guitar solos, never subject to overlong gonzo technique-for-technique’s sake flash.
Like Ruttle’s harp, Jake Lear’s singing and songwriting can be described as Dylanesque as well. His vocal style is reminiscent of a lower-register Bob Dylan, and his masterful songwriting partakes of those deliciously surprising lyric twists that are so much part of Dylan’s songs, with their infusing into the mundane and standard the brittle and surrealistic.
All these making Lost Time Blues one strong effort from Jake Lear that’s both artistically compelling and fun to listen and dance to. Add to its credit the two Anna DeMauro photo montages that grace the front and back covers, and this CD becomes a visual knockout as well as an aural one.

Lost Time Blues