The creative multi-instrumentalist and astonishingly assiduous re-worker of blues sounds & American roots music — Englishman MIKE ROSS — has released a double A side single, titled “The Only Place You Ever Take Me Is Down” a number taken from his recent album ‘The Clovis Limit Tennessee Transition’.
The electric version (both renditions are mashed for fun on the video) has a Lennon & McCartney-esque feel to its double-tracked solos and a clever backflip in the lyrics while the acoustic version is tense and tentative.
If you’ve ever wondered (or experienced) what it feels like to be pulverized by a relationship, the grinding, scraping, and beating that goes on (inside) a person… this is how it feels — in musical form. This is how tempers fray and become resentments.
Like all the good blues, this song is a feat of corrugation, clanking, and chamfering: it’s as if MIKE ROSS and his band try to weld together all the castings that life throws up, trying to make sense of untidy feelings. So this is a song of beauty and blemishes!
The larger album itself is filled with subtle vignettes, moog snippets, vocal cameos, and a brilliant guitar. It’s a collection of songs born of ambitious authorship and offered with astute configurations and plenty of momentous moments hidden beneath laid-back rock. If you like James Gang, you will love it.
For more info visit www.mikerossmusic.co.uk
Words: @neilmach 2021 ©
Main image: Photo Credit Neil Collins
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