Kevin Kinney – Sun Tangled Angel Revival
Your choice: You can view this as a Kevn Kinney record with a little something for everybody, or the Kevn Kinney record for somebody who likes a little bit of everything.
Kinney, working with a core band of guitarist Gibb Droll, Slackdaddy bassist Bryan Howard, and Kathleen Turner Overdrive drummer Dave V. Johnson, offers hard-rocking, Drivin’ N’ Cryin’-echoing songs as well as tunes that, like his solo work, lean folkward. There are new numbers (the ruminative “Everything’s So Different Now”, which is built around a sparkling pop chorus) and old ones (the Blasters-style rave-up “Baby I Just Wanna Go Home” dates back to Kinney’s punk days in Milwaukee).
There are compact songs, such as the acoustic sing-along “In The Land Of Plenty”, and songs that stretch for miles, with a pair from that latter category serving as album highlights. Courtesy of its title, “(Welcome To The) Sun Tangled Revival” teases that it could be a “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” for the roots-rock set, but its recurring riff, which crashes back in around the five-minute mark like a sunburned angel, is much too ominous for that. The nearly eight-minute “The Train Don’t Stop At The Millworks Anymore” has a fitting chug and rattle, while Adam Musick’s pedal steel cuts through like the train’s farewell whistle. Balancing images of a once-bustling shop with memories of flattened nickels on train tracks, Kinney writes the perfect eulogy for lost jobs and lost childhood.
There’s even an instrumental, in the form of the Booker T & the MGs-ish “The Great North Myrtle Beach Pancake Massacre”. The album closes with a spoken-word piece of sorts titled “Epilogue Epitaph In A Minor” that’s equal parts sermon, gripin’ blues, and stream-of-consciousness poetry. It’s a bit scattershot, but it earns your attention. Just like this record.