I look forward to those moments when music from Downtown Mystic slides out of the review pile, engages with my ear, and slips under the pen. Maybe it is something about the simple sonic honesty of it all, something about the retro sounds being polished up for a more contemporary audience, or something about the relatability of his songs. It is certainly about how well crafted, cleverly honed, infectious and enjoyable the songs are.
Whether he is kicking out, stadium-ready, foot on the monitor, rockers with E Street Band alumni or, as he is here, caught up in a more spacious, vintage rock and blues groove, his music floats across this digitally manipulated, style over substance, social media-driven, focus-group pleasing, fame and fortune uber alles musical landscape like a cool, refreshing and cleansing breeze.
‘Maybe Love’s A Crime’ is a heady blend of that unmissable barrelhouse piano sound, guitars that are happy to chop and groove, steady and unfussy beats, bass lines that gently push and propel, hazy harmonies and our favourite Mystic man laying out a tale of a relationship balanced on the knife-edge of love and loss, a story both as old as the hills, a sentiment still timelessly relevant.
Much music is subject to the whims of fad and winds of fashion; influences (you know, the kids living in houses paid for by their CEO fathers’ marketing company) and gatekeepers (you know, ego-driven idiots) love to tell us what is in vogue and what is uncool. But songs like ‘Maybe Love’s A Crime’ and artists like DownTown Mystic are impervious to that nonsense; music like this is never in or out of style. It’s just there, a constant, a universal sonic truth, the backbone of the modern music industry itself, made for the right reasons and enjoyed merely for the sound it makes. It’s as simple as that!
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