Anyone who can cover so much sonic ground over just the first two tracks of the album yet still makes them feel like they belong sitting cheek-by-jowl on the same album is someone you, the discerning music fan, needs to know more about. And so it is with the opening sonic salvos from Block’s latest album, The Greene Street Sessions. If “It Never Happened” ebbs and flows dexterously between understated folk lulls and driven rock highs, “Take a Step Back,” which follows, sounds like Lou Reed taking a funky strut through an underground soul back catalog. Bam! A brilliant sonic one-two, opposites that attract, the old switcheroo, that’s how you grab the potential listeners’ attention.
Similarly, if “Little Black Girl” has that inner city swagger, a musical meandering through the wrong part of town groove, the brilliantly titled “Cigarettes, Prozac and Scotch” is a smart and heartfelt post-breakup slice of alt-folk meets garage rock. And then there are songs like “The Pink House Must Burn,” which is, well…who knows…psychedelic-blues-glam, I don’t know, you get to a point with Block that he is mixing and matching and merging genres so uniquely that you can start making up genres for the songs. At least, that’s what I do.
Then you bend your ear in and listen to the lyrics, and they are about as authentically from the wrong side of the urban tracks, as you hoped they would be, fracture prose and edgy poetics, and musical mythologies garnered from those places that the likes of you and I, but not Block, would think twice about treading. Back street operas that feel as if they were penned by someone like Burkowski…when he was having a particularly bad week.
Like all great albums, “The Greene Street Sessions” takes you to new places, in this case, places that you might not want to visit in person. Well, now you don’t have to.
Website
Facebook
Spotify
Instagram
