Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
One of the being alive in the 21st Century is finding more and more music in which to take a certain degree of delight in. Not only in the extravagantly opulent amount of new songs paraded by people with something extraordinary fighting in their soul, the ones that refuse to lay down and take a metaphorical punching from successive people underestimating their age, their attitude, stance or particular opinion on a subject, but also in the fact that never before has so much been available from every decade, every century in which the combination of right tones, breathes and flickering beauty has been captured.
For those that have no issue in looking back to the greats of a defining genre, it is almost like bathing in the great songs and finding just how extraordinary they are when they are polished up and without the hindrance of a 100 years of cackle and snap between the grooves. It takes someone of sublime ability though in which to capture the moments that were perhaps at one time lost to all.
For Finland’s Erja Lyytinen, the Queen of Scandinavian Blues, taking on some of the tunes first played by the great Elmore James only serves notice that whilst to live in the decade that we inhabit, to be able to go back in time, to carefully place your hand around Erja Lyytinen’s and get her to go up to stage with Elmore James and seeing these two creative souls together in the same place is worth suffering the wrath of cause and effect.
The album, The Sky Is Crying, is one in which the whispers of a great man come resonating down through the years and in which tethers the reigns outside Erja’s studio, pops his head round the door and allows the ghost of the past to nod sweetly at what he surveys. The resonating smile of a man 50 years in the Blues nirvana is captured from a tremendous female perspective in the songs on offer, proving that Blues is gender transferable, that to think of it in the same terms of a 100 years ago is, an attitude that some still hold onto, just pure bunkum.
The listener only has to take in the great voice and slide guitar supplied by Erja Lyytinen, to wallow in the ability of musicians beside her, such as David Floreno, Miri Miettinen, the superb Jukka Eskola on trumpet and Petri Poulitaival, to know that James’ contribution to music is timeless. Tracks such as It Hurts Me Too, Got To Be More, Sho Nuff, the haunting Something Inside Me and the captivating live version of Dust My Broom are just incredible and stand against the ravages of time because Ms. Lyytinen has had the grace to bestow these classics onto a fresher, perhaps keener, audience.
Time is not always kind, the mechanics of a more modern age sometimes more brutal and unforgiving and unable to appreciate the long since passed and past, but The Sky Is Crying is a definitive article, a hug from generation to the other and the words of thanks uttered with pride through the mist and the much missed.
Ian D. Hall