Rating:

Here’s an analogy. See if you can fill in the blanks. Joe Satriani is to guitar as ______ is to harmonica. If you answered “John Popper,” you’re absolutely right. Fill in any guitar wankster, from Satriani to Steve Vai, and you’d have a suitable analogy. That’s not to say that Popper’s harmonica playing keeps Blues Traveler from making good records, not at all. The point is that his harmonica playing is obviously the focus of the music on a goodly portion of the songs on Four. Popper and his bandmates occasionally obscure that fact by writing a good song to go with his playing, but rarely does a tune go by without a dizzyingly fast solo from the lead singer. The only exceptions are the two power ballads, “Look Around” and “Just Wait,” and even those two exclusions feature the obligatory solo on another instrument, Chan Kinchla’s guitar. It is no coincidence that the huge singles “Run Around” and “Hook” contain the most reserved of any of Popper solos on Four, the solos with most hummable and whistle-able melodies. Sometimes, however, being a virtuoso is called for and John meets the task, like on the balls-to-the-wall blues-rock of “Crash Burn” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Anyone attracted to Four by either of its two popular singles should be forewarned that, like many albums, the singles are not a great deal like the album cuts. By and large, Blues Traveler play blues-rock boogies, not the blues-inflected pop of their singles. Luckily, on this album they manage to perform equally as well on both styles of music, making for a generally satisfying listening experience.

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– Kevin

This 35-beetsreview was posted on March 16th, 2005. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.