Pokey LaFarge
Album: Something In The Water
Label: Rounder
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.pokeylafarge.com

Quite possibly not his given first name, St Louis' LaFarge is 31, but sounds as though he might have been in deep freeze since the 1920s, recreating early American music with a cocktail of swing, New Orleans jazz, string band, ragtime and country blues. On this album which features his regular trio of Joey Glynn, Adam Hoskins and Ryan Koenig alongside members of NRBQ, the Modern Sounds, the Fat Babies and the Western Elstons, the focus is on the Midwest, the musicians themselves coming from Wisconsin, Illinois and Chicago as well as St. Louis with the album recorded in Chicago with Jimmy Sutton at the helm.

There's no washboards this time around, but there's lashings of brass, a sousaphone, clarinet and piano as well as more prominence for the drums. Of the dozen cuts, two are blues standards, When Did You Leave Heaven and the brassy goodtime swagger All Night Long, but everything else is original material, all perfectly attuned to the period they evoke. Notable highlights include the ragtime Wanna Be Your Man, the tribal rhythm jazzy Underground, the Louis Jordan feel of the title track, the flamenco handclapping swayalong ballad Goodbye, Barcelona (a number redolent of such vaudeville greats as The Man On The Flying Trapeze) the jittery Actin' A Fool with Koenig on guitar banjo and, in a rare excursion into restrained ballad territory, the cowboy crooner Far Away. Nodding to the Midwestern influence that runs throughout, the album brings down the curtain with the playfully witty and not a little autobiographical swing of Knocking The Dust Off The Rust Belt Tonight where he declares, "from the C-H-I to the S-T-L, I was born raise a ruckus and do it well." He certainly does.

Mike Davies