(Chuck) LeMonds
Album: The Rivers Call
Label: Live In Trees Music
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.chucklemonds.org

This turns out to be a really tasty CD. And considering The Rivers Call is but the latest in a long series of (nine) album releases since 1988, I'm so surprised I've not heard Chuck's music before. It may just be that those earlier albums weren't anything like as good as this latest, I guess, but who'm I to say?

Instead, let's go solely on the evidence of The Rivers Call, which presents a sequence of nine songs that both impress at once with their delicate, light touch and yet contain a heady, intimate soulfulness that's equally irresistible. The opener Let's Go Down Stream parades in on some rollicking swampy boogie-shuffle drumming à-la-Feat then introduces a "sweet Orleans" refrain on cool female chorus vocals; the ensuing number, Bringing Mary K Home, retains the girls but transports them to easygoing mando-flecked country, then To Bee Or Not To Bee settles down after a frenetic, buzzingly virtuoso bowed-upright-bass prelude into a cooing (and lightly punning) environmentally-conscious persuasion. Those opening tracks couldn't be more different from each other, yet all of them are unified by Chuck's sensitive, yet laid-back vocalisations. Moving on into the heart of the disc, we come across lap-steel country shuffle on the title song, Claptonesque charm on The Letter Home (a setting by Chuck of words from poems by John Weir and Petra Schaller), and delicious, deft slow-cookin' Cooderesque funk on See The One You Love and Put In A Good Word For Me.

Aside from album closer Top Of The World (a beautifully fragile cover of the Patty Griffin song), all the tracks come from Chuck's own pen, and only the leisurely instrumental cut Good Things Come To Him seems to overstay the value of its jazzy riff by around a third of its five-minute length. Even so, it doesn't spoil the mood of the disc, which leaves a warm glow of contentment in its wake.

David Kidman