Susan O'Neil & Jennifer Lauletta - Don't Blame The Blues

Size: 326 MB
Time: 48:16
File: Flac
Released: 2006
Styles: Blues
Art: Front

1. Stay With Me (4:49)
2. Thank Another Man (4:34)
3. Don't Blame The Blues (3:46)
4. Intuitious (3:44)
5. Calling All Doctors (3:02)
6. Still Thinking of Him (4:00)
7. Come Tomorrow (3:59)
8. Lonely Town (3:58)
9. We KNow Better (3:06)
10. Down on the Corner (4:29)
11. Didn't Mean It (3:22)
12. Wailin In the Wind (5:23)

Susan O'Neil, who has been part of the Louisville music scene for a number of years, has released her do-it-yourself project Don't Blame the Blues. Recorded at Jeff Carpenter's Reel to Real basement studio, O'Neil and a host of talent that includes bassist Jimmy Brown, guitarists Greg Walker and Butch Morgan, trumpeter Roger Dane, vocalists Martha Brewer and Robbie Bartlett (Louisville's own Blues Queen) and O'Neil's husband, Rick, take their water from Blues River and parcel it out generously into songs that slide between smoky and straight-ahead traditional. Whether she's singing about a wife's gratefully thwarted infidelity in the sultry "Thank Another Man," or good vibes in the slow rhythm-and-blues, affirmation-loaded "Come Tomorrow," or in the title track with its whipcrack drums and growling Hammond organ, O'Neil's voice has a the kind of light rasp that flavors her lyrics with experience. It isn't the rasp of a woman who has burned her life away with two packs of cigarettes a day while wallowing in gin-tinged bitterness. Instead, her rasp is the kind that belongs to someone who speaks out and often, unafraid to let folks know what hurts and what feels good. Besides the tracks already mentioned, O'Neil brings some fun to the bouncy "Calling All Doctors," but she also provides some scowling social commentary on the thuggery that abounds in pockets of some of the city's neighborhoods in "Down on the Corner" and of the indifference and fear that feeds it. Proof that blues aren't just personal: They can be political, too. If the sweet, clean waters from Blues River give us Don't Blame the Blues, then the dirty, gritty cupful we get from another part of the river gives us Skeptictank from Lexington's Taildragger. Putting it bluntly, this is blues with mondo cajones: guitar heavy with trip-hammer drums and bass lines that can rattle the bunions off your feet. This is the music the Norse god Thor plays on his stereo after hurling lightning bolts all day.

Don't Blame The Blues FLAC

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