How does all the liquor make the heart grow fonder?

I had a review of the new Limes album Rhinestone River on Friday at Dusted. It's another of Goner's blues-garage offerings, led by Shawn Cripps (who played on one of my favorite albums, Mr. Airplane Man's Cmon DJ) and supported by Harlan T. Bobo, whom I've written about here before.

Here's a bit from the review:

Cripps slouches at the center of this casual mesh of talent, moving the songs along with slow blues-guitar licks and spoke-sung verses, widely spaced with contemplation and punctuated, occasionally by high hillbilly falsetto. His never-any-hurry delivery — he sounds like a bluesier Bill Callahan — twists ordinary imagery into vaguely surreal shapes…a cigarette machine’s lights turning psychedelic in “Rhinestone River,” midway lights and rollercoasters taking on mythic shape in “Rusty Old Clock.” Bobo is his chief partner in musical conversation, nudging the action forward with slumberous bass lines, adding ghostly commentaries on a variety of keyboards, and, at one point, banging on the piano like a cakewalk madman.

The rest of the review is here:
http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/5891

A video of Limes at SXSW

http://vimeo.com/3866188

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.