For those who celebrate the day FM rock stations decided it was safe to stop playing “White Bird” on an hourly basis, some bad news. Sam Bush feels he must fly on It’s A Beautiful Day’s sole claim to fame, in as faithful a fashion as you can imagine, with the help of singer and violinist Andrea Zonn.
That’s the first strike against Laps In Seven. The second strike is a cover of Julie Miller’s “The River’s Gonna Run”. Great tune, but featuring Buddy Miller on guitar and Buddy & Julie cohort Emmylou Harris on backing vocal only gives the performance more of a Miller lite feel.
Bush is a decent singer, but a better mandolinist. The reason Laps In Seven doesn’t strike out is that, for the most part, the music neatly blends guts and craft. That’s especially true when the onetime New Grass Revivalist tilts hard toward bluegrass, as on “Bringing In The Mail”, and projects soulful emotion, as on the organ-pumped, gospel-voiced “I Wanna Do Right”, a Katrina tribute he wrote with Jeff Black.
Bush and his core band, including guitarist Keith Sewell, bassist Byron House and banjoist Scott Vestal, are a bit overplugged on the title cut (named for its typically offbeat time signature and the rhythmic drinking of Bush’s dog; this is also Bush’s seventh solo album), but they rise to the challenge of sustaining the epic narrative of Darrell Scott’s “River Take Me”.