Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There is something strangely comforting about revisiting a group’s past, even if it over 20 years later. The experience of listening to how songs sounded then to how you know they sound now live can be cathartic, a nod to the nostalgic in us all. It is even more humbling when you put place a new C.D. on, slip the headphones over the ears and wallow in something so majestically cool that you can only check the album over a few times just to make sure that the C.D. isn’t the wrong one, that what you are listening to really is the band a quarter of century later.
The sound; the bountiful and lavish creation that the Spin Doctors were noted for as they trawled round New York City in the late 80s, that Blues devilment, once more beguiles listeners as they turn away for a while from the music that conveyed them across the last couple of decades and head back to their roots in their new album If The River Was Whiskey.
The breeding ground of Downtown New York stood the Spin Doctors in good stead; it made them who they are today. Without the guile to succeed, that good old fashioned New York approach, the band probably wouldn’t be around today, still performing and more importantly recording. In If The River Was Whiskey, Eric Schenkman, Arron Comess, Chris Barron and Mark White have produced something rather extraordinary, an homage within an homage, not just a nod to nostalgia but a return to the quality that drove them in the first place, from Downtown New York to global superstars and it started with the Blues.
If the band has recorded the album to sound dangerous, then they have surpassed themselves. Songs such as the excellent Some Other Man Instead, the haunting Sweetest Portion, The Drop and Ben’s Looking Out Of The Window Blues are not just dangerous they are openly defiant, a two finger salute to those that say you can never recapture a long lost vibe, love or spirit. This salute is heartening, forthright and brilliant, the music superb and Chris Barron still sounds as fresh as he did when singing in venues all over America all those years ago.
If The River Was Whiskey is released in the U.K. on Monday 6th May.
Ian D. Hall