Marc Miner – Ol’ Well
A guitar is a luxury that the truly great bluesmen, the ones whose heart hangs heavy with melancholy, will take and use, but don’t need. The guitar and all other instruments played by a combo are just devices to get the unconverted to come in, sit down and have a peak. However, the ones who have already heard the word, the ones who feel the hurt within their soul, just need a voice to guide them.
Son House, in a performance made famous by modern fan Jack White, just slapped his hands off-beat and sang about the evils of the world on “Grinning in Your Face.” That must mean that some of the best blues songs to have ever been put into the world were sung by people who needed to sing them and never got recorded.
Marc Miller searches for the truth on “Ol’ Well” and doesn’t mind the pain of having to dig deep to find it. Miller, inspired by old American blues music, is confident enough in his search that he uses no other sounds than his voice and the clapping of his hands. “Ol’ Well” is a spiritual blues number for people in need of some kind of redemption. Any other instruments or a running time longer than the current one would merely steal away from the time devoted to the search.
Hamish Anderson – Sweet Dreams
The music you listen to in the daytime cannot be the same music that you listen to at night. Not unless you are some kind of maniac, or you suffer from a kind of monomania involving songs.
It’d simply be bizarre, if you are, for example, a fan of garage-rock, punk or metal, to have those be the songs that you play before going to bed. Are you looking for nightmares about tidal waves washing over your building?
It’d be equally bizarre to be at the end of a romantic rendezvous and to regale the object of your affection with the same sounds you have playing in your headphones when you do your morning run. Do you want them to run out of the apartment and call the cops?
Nah, what you need is music that only works in the nighttime. Under the cover of darkness, Hamish Anderson does his best work. “Sweet Dreams” is folk and blues-inspired music that you’d normally get to when turning on the radio while driving your car late at night. Should the DJ in charge of manning the playlist until morning play anything faster or louder, they’d risk you driving into a tree. Yeah, Hamish Anderson is soothing, echoes classic-rock heroes like Tom Petty, and works hard to convince you that tomorrow is a new and, potentially, better day.
