RANDALL BRAMBLETT Rich Someday (New West)
Blessed with the perfect purpose-built Southern rock name, Georgia resident Bramblett is a former member of Sea Level and The Enlightenment Road Band. A pianist and saxophonist, his resume also includes stints with Steve Winwood, The Allman Brothers Band and Widespread Panic.
Perhaps predictably, then, there’s a deep, thick Southern swampiness to the arrangements on “Rich Someday”. “Where Are You Tonight?”, which opens with the line “Standing by a statue of Stevie Ray Vaughan”, might not be startlingly original but its mesh of Hammond washes, guitar and hammer-down percussive propulsion begs to be played loudly on blazing hot summer afternoons.
The album doesn’t maintain the quality of this opening shot, but it’s still spikier than yer average, diversifying into pots and pans garage clatter on the title track, and “It’s Alright” spreads its ache like butter across the open plains. The pinpricks of piano on “The More You’re Fading” sound almost like Robert Wyatt, and there’s something appropriately creeping and seeping about “Oil Spot”.
Bramblett doesn’t write conventional storylines, his songs are more like impressionistic collisions of images that gently nudge the listener towards a destination. Consequently they don’t have much in the way of narrative drive, yet sometimes it works in their favour, such as on the sparse, ghostly “Concrete Mind”, which sounds clouded with remorse.