As “No Stopping Me Now” kicks off this excellent value for money album (23 tracks !), as this opening salvo’s seductive flavours and deft guitar lines wash over you, you might be excused in thinking that Out of Obscurity is a blues album. I’ll admit that there is undoubtedly a blues vibe running through a lot of what we find here, but, like all sonically articulate and musically adventurous artists, it is just one element to be found here.
Take “Searching,” a funky, rock ‘n’ soul jam of the highest order, groove and grit dancing deftly together, an infectious blend of all the things that turn rock and roll into something sassy and subtle and seductive in the first place. This is rock and roll with a passport to cross all all and any lines of musical demarcation. And then, turning a complete 180, we are given a stripped-down version of “Frustration,” where the singer-songwriter oeuvre sees the light and gets soulful. All that and we are only four songs in.
“Moon On A String” is a modern neo-soul song soaked in decades of blues, the sort of song whose accessibility and sheer addictive quality make you wish the pop scene and the charts were full of this sound, but whose creative class explains why it isn’t. (The mainstream really needs to hold itself to higher standards… do that and this could be yours!)
“Endings” is a shuffling, dancefloor groover, “I’m Not” is the sort of rock crossover that Lenny Kravitz would wrestle you bodily to the ground to get his hands on, and “Don’t Stop Writing Love Songs” is a raw and riff-driven slice of anthemicism, plenty of rock and all the roll!
23 tracks is a lot of material even by today’s album standards, but the fact that Bill Barlow makes music that is so engaging, so adventurous, so creative, so generically slippery is what wins through. In fact, after listening to this, you feel that he could have put twice that amount on the record and it would still feel like nothing more than an exciting, energized ride.
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