Word: harmonicas
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...Christmas." If you've heard one Blues Traveler song, you've pretty much heard them all. Nonetheless, much like with the Smashing Pumpkins song, The magic of "Christmas" lies in the booming voice of big John Popper singing about the exhilarating holiday season and the jolly melody of his harmonica. The entire album is much like these two songs; not original, but still very beautiful...
...Turn a scorpions-in-a-bucket movie; deadly critters snap at one another until only the strongest (or the top billed) survives. It also honors the familiar tropes of hombre films, from the requisite convenience-store holdup and multiple murder to a strident Ennio Morricone score (with the banshee harmonica from his Sergio Leone westerns). There's also a waitress named Flo. Stone swathes all this menace in his patented white-hot style: slo-mo, echoing voices, flashbacks that flick like lightning, cartoon sound effects (when the Mustang is mentioned, you'll hear a horse whinny). A streetwise Indian...
Summer 1997 seems like a good moment for Blues Traveler. Grunge is gone, alternative is stale, and so the band's harmonica-happy pop-blues may be just what audiences want. The group's last studio album, Four, featured two terrific hits, Run-around and Hook, and sold 6 million copies. With its follow-up CD, Blues Traveler had the chance to extend its success and prove that it really deserves to be touted as the next Grateful Dead...
...aggressively mediocre album. The problem with Four was that its two great songs were islands in a sea of banality, and the new record suffers from the same inconsistency. It starts off well with a stirring workout called Carolina Blues, but the rest of the album is long on harmonica solos and short on melodies. The songs aren't bad--Canadian Rose, Felicia and Most Precarious are modestly entertaining--but they aren't exactly good either...
...MUSIC: "Summer 1997 seems like a good moment for Blues Traveler," says TIME's Christopher John Farley. "Grunge is gone, alternative is stale, and so the band?s harmonica-happy pop-blues may be just what audiences want. Alas, 'Straight On Till Morning,' the band's follow-up to the 6-million-selling 'Four,' is an aggressively mediocre album. The problem with 'Four' was that its two great songs were islands in a sea of banality, and the new record suffers from the same inconsistency, resulting in an album long on harmonica solos and short on melodies...