Every spring I look for a new CD good enough to become the soundtrack for the coming summer. I spend too much money and usually end up disappointed. Then I resort back to the Stone's Exile on Main Street and Sly's There's a Riot Goin' On for my drives up to the cabin.
Not this year. Little Man's Soulful Automatic is the perfect summer album. It's fun, it's funky, and it fulfills the most difficult to find aspect of the great summer album - it sounds fresh regardless of how many times you listen to it.
The lead-off track Come Undone is a droning, evocative, Eastern-sounding song. Its ascending refrain sounds like Jimmy Page finally made it to Kashmir. It is truly mood-altering and it charges the air for the songs that follow. The next song, Out for Miles, is a love song that aches without getting sloppy. Its big pop hooks would fit on Magical Mystery Tour. Shag If You Want To and You Love It are the album's rockers. Shag's stuttering guitar solo makes me drive too fast and the feedback squeal that sounds when Little Man's Chris Perricelli sings I love it when your lights light up on You Love It is too perfect to be contrived. Tire Fire, Prize Fighters and California Baby are clean-sounding acoustic guitar songs. they contain rockabilly grooves, soaring falseto vocals and country-tinged slide guitar solos. Shimmering Stars and the Majestic Moon is a driving, psychedelic instrumental.
The bottom line: there isn't a single clunker on Soulful Automatic. How many rock albums, even the so-called classics, can honestly claim that?
By Craig Planting