Essential Studio Albums

[liebzz]

Marshall Tucker Band - Still Smokin’

For much of this album, this seemed to me a band that lost its spark. The songs seemed kind of tired, the playing largely perfunctory - at least through the first 8 songs or so. The album actually ends on a pretty good high though: Southern Spirit is a solid southern rock track followed by the country blues ballad Let Me Come Home - final moments that breathed some life into this.

The Essential Track: Southern Spirit

Up Next: The Black Crowes - The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion

[wease]

Marshall Tucker Band - Still Smokin’

For much of this album, this seemed to me a band that lost its spark. The songs seemed kind of tired, the playing largely perfunctory - at least through the first 8 songs or so. The album actually ends on a pretty good high though: Southern Spirit is a solid southern rock track followed by the country blues ballad Let Me Come Home - final moments that breathed some life into this.

The Essential Track: Southern Spirit

Makes sense. Chief songwriter/guitarist Toy Caldwell was gone at this point. Hell, all but two of the original members were gone. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a track from this album. When you have a MTB album with no Toy Caldwell (and at this point, he’s still alive) I’m not interested.

[liebzz]

The Black Crowes - The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion

For their second album, they manage to one-up one of the great debut albums. Southern Harmony doesn’t play off their Faces influence as hard, but creates a space where they are so effortlessly comfortable in their own sound that it’s less about who they are influenced by, and more about who they are as a band - a moment in time when all the players really meshed as one and delivered basically a perfect album - or at least as perfect and they could get. They front of the album plays like a greatest hits, with Sting Me, Remedy, and Thorn in My Pride killing it right out the gates. The middle of the record finds the band digging deeper into their sound, but no less impressive, with Bad Luck Blue Eyes, Sometimes Salvation, and Hotel Illness. Black Moon Creeping really stuck for me here too, as I think I have probably heard that song the least of the many greats on this album, but it rocks pretty hard but still fits here. The album then finishes on a glorious streak of No Speak No Slave, the epic My Morning Song, and then says goodnight with an acoustic cover of Bob Marley’s Time Will Tell - a perfect coda to such an exceptional album.

The Essential Track: My Morning Song

Up Next: Blind Melon