Daniel Meade
Album: Keep Right Away
Label: From The Top
Tracks: 13
Website: https://soundcloud.com/daniel-meade

Having struck up a solid friendship with Old Crow Medicine Show, including playing support at their Glasgow show, Meade got a call from bassist Morgan Jahnig offering to engineer and produce his next album. Heading out to Tennessee, Meade found himself with something of a dream band, featuring OCMS's Cory Yount and Chance McCoy alongside multi-instrumentalist Chris Scruggs and fiddler Joshua Hedley (who takes the spotlight on the appropriately titled jubilant gospel Sing it Loud) as well as a guest appearance by Critter Fuqua from the Crows while calling in to contribute duets were Shelly Colvin on the ragtime piano rollicking Not My Heart Again and Diana Jones on honky tonk waltzer Help Me Tonight.

As you'll gather from the company he keeps, Meade's very much old school country, his cocktail of rockabilly, honky tonk, bluegrass and boogie-woogie drawing on such influences as Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, Lefty Frizell and Big Bill Broonzy.

There's no deep agenda at play here, just songs, most taken at a breathless pace (Livin' On Tootsie Time, fiddle and piano gospel Trying and the banjo-driven Rising River Blues, for example), about good times and bad times, about the joys of smoking (the 50s harmonica blowing, piano pumping Gimme A Draw) and about pain of love gone wrong (George Jones styled honky tonk ballad Sometimes A Fool's The Last To Know).

It's all solid stuff, but I'd particularly highlight a couple of tracks, Always Close To Tears, a classic mid-tempo country ballad that you could have imagined Gram and Emmylou doing, and, featuring Fuqua on accordion, the wistfully reflective border-country waltzer Mexico, a number that, with no disrespect to its companions, seems to have slightly more musical and lyrical ambition. Ignore the album title, if Meade's music is your sort of country this is one you really should welcome with open arms.

Mike Davies