The Waterboys
Album: Modern Blues
Label: Harlequin and Clown
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.mikescottwaterboys.com

The 11th album under the band soubriquet, though, these days, with only fiddler Steve Wickham anything like a constant presence, it's really just Mike Scott and whatever musicians he happens to take into the studio (this time round including Muscle Shoals bassist David Hood) and on tour, this is unlikely to recapture errant followers still pining for the Celtic anthemic strains of Whole Of The Moon and it's certainly not going to find a place in any blues purist's collection, but, if you like big rock riffs welded to southern R&B and filtered through Scott's Dublin-absorbed tones and intense delivery (at times evoking a constipation-straining Dylan) then it does have its attractions.

Recorded in Nashville, it opens with a sprawling, near six minute Destinies Entwined, organ, brass, fiddle and rugged guitars underpinning lyrics strewn with Scott's trademark quasi Yeats-inspired mysticism. It's a riff-chugging rock rock blues that's also thickly applied to the rolling, Dylanesque Hammond swirling swampy boogie self-affirming ("things disappear… but I'm still here!") Still A Freak (four minutes on disc but suggesting it be jammed into eternity live) and Long Strange Golden Road, the 10 minute plus closer which, preceded by a sample of Jack Keruoac reading from One The Road, brings together Young, Dylan and Springsteen for its epic trip through stream of consciousness verses and anthemic, crown-singalong friendly chorus before an organ powered instrumental fade in the manner of All Along The Watchtower.

Taking the musical bombast down just a notch, the lyrically self-explanatory Rosalind (You Married The Wrong Guy) is mid-tempo swaggering strut with 70s glam and blues roots that, in the way it briefly pauses its riff, nods to the same technique in Hendrix's Purple Haze, while the line "pick up her skirts and flee" surely echoes Bolan's exhortation to Desdemona to 'pick up your skirt and fly'. Likewise, sporting a poppy sensibility, Beautiful Now, is a fairly straightforward tumbling slice of rock, roots n soul that's likely to be compared to Springsteen but is probably more Little Steven.

Not everything is so intent on showing of its muscles. November Tale's break-up story (from whence comes the name of the label) is couched in warm Memphis soul, Nearest Thing To Hip is a slow soul chug which, namechecking Parker, Davis and Coltrane, laments the days when jazz cafes, book and record stores were a welcoming haven for unreconstructed beats and musos while, wafting on flourishes of Summer Breeze guitar, I Can See Elvis is an equally nostalgic, doo wop tinged, rose-tinted reminiscence that ups the album's already substantial namecheck quotient by referencing Charlie Parker, Jimi, Marvin, Crazy Horse and Lennon as well as reimagining Presley in the afterlife as some intellectual giant talking philosophy with Joan of Arc and Plato. Mind you, his Elvis impersonation won't get him a slot on Stars In Their Eyes.

He's also in reflective mood on the heartfelt if slightly whimsical The Girl Who Slept For Scotland, arguably the album's best track, which, with its oh oh-ing harmonies, is an intimate tender memory of a former lover with a propensity for extended naps, though who, when awake, would moan like a woman "and gave sweet head", making love like synchronized guitars with kisses bursting "like popping suns".

Not an album to send curious new arrivals trawling the back catalogue perhaps, but for those who have maintained faith, it keeps the fires burning nicely.

Mike Davies