North Mississippi Allstars : Prayer For Peace

 

96Hz/24-bit, FLAC*; Sony Legacy 88985423992 (supplied buy www.highresaudio.com)

Remember Ten Years After? This is the sort of ‘roots music’ that inspired that band, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Golden Earring, Little Feat, and countless others. Heavy white-boy blues, simple lyrics, extremely repetitive rock arrangements with almost no rhythmic variation, an exaggerated bottom octave, and too much slide guitar all add up to minimal interest for this reviewer, but despite its utter familiarity, or perhaps because of it, lots of blues-rock fans will likely devour this album. Opinions vary, and that’s a very good thing. Many of its songs have been done better by other bands (‘You Got To Move,’ ‘Bid You Goodnight’) and fortunately, none of them runs longer than five minutes. Some tracks might work well as late-night driving music, but ‘Prayer For Peace’ is another collection that would serve better in an eclectic mix than as a stand-alone recording. BW

Sound Quality: 70%

Hi-Fi News Lab Report

Recorded in no fewer than six different studios, most of the tracks are mixed ‘hot’ and up to the 0dBFs endstops, and most show evidence of mixed sample rate content. ‘Deep Ellum’, trk 6, looks like a bad upsample from 44.1kHz. PM

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