Can I Come Home for the Summer, I Could Slow Down for a Little While

In a story I broke yesterday, John Mellencamp has a new album out and it is boring (see I’m not Falling up the Ladder), a claim made because the new blood of folk has made the genre much more interesting in the past decade than the Mellencamp disk has to offer. Another of those previously mentioned new bloods is the mountain man looking Ray LaMontagne (whose song Trouble was perfectly used in the commercial with the dog trying to hid his bone safely, maybe not a good ad from the company’s perspective because I cannot recall off the top of my head).

Unlike other folk revivalist recently that take a more rock approach, LaMontange fuses his folk with a heavy dose of blue eyed soul. But Ray took a dip into the bland with his last album Gossip in the Grain with almost every song in the set sounding like we have heard it before. Thankfully for his follow up Ray hook thing up by adding a backing band, the Pariah Dogs, to the equation that brought him out of rut much like when Ryan Adams brought together the Cardinals.

The new album God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise starts out with the very un-Ray like blues meets funk grooves of Repo Man before settling into familiar territory with New York City’s Killing Me for those that are dawn to LaMontange’s more sensitive tracks. New York instantly rivals Trouble as one of his best tracks in his catalogue. That is followed up with the just as strong title track with is waltzing slide guitar opening. Another standout track from the album is the breezy Beg Steal or Borrow which sees LaMontange sing in a mid tempo song that you could mistake for a Nick Drake cover.

Song to Download – New York City's Killing Me

God Willin’ and the Creek Don’t Rise gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.