Harlan T. Bobo…the happy album

Harlan T. Bobo, the Memphis garage compatriot of various Oblivians and the Viva L’American Death Ray Music crew, has a new album called Sucker out on Goner now, and it’s a good one, with whispery guitar-picked ballads and all-out rockers (“Bad Boyfriends” is my favorite of these). I reviewed it for Dusted, and here’s a bit of that:
In his last album, I’m Your Man, Harlan T. Bobo rasped out his desire for a more settled existence in a line from “My Life,” admitting, “I’d love to have a family and a home” in the verse and finishing the guitar-blistered finale with a repeated longing for “someone to love.” Since that 2007 release, the Memphis blues eccentric has, in fact, gotten married and fathered a son. He now spends summers, apparently, scooping ice cream at his French wife’s beach-side ice cream stand. It sounds like a reasonably happy life, and this sense of contentment reverberates throughout Bobo’s third album, beginning right up front with the string and brass-embellished Franco-phile pop, “Sweet Life.” “It took so, so long to understand,” sings Bobo, in his tarnished but noticeably hopeful murmur, “life is sweet.”

Wait, there’s more.


I’m not finding any media, except for the MySpace.