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TRUTH IS NOT FICTION
(TELARC)
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Haunting, psychedelic, and darker than the bottom of a grave, Taylor’s music remains unique in contemporary blues. And this may be his finest album. Still deploying a sound and a bent in his writing that draws on the roots and history of African-Americans, on the lives of misfits and have-nots, he creates some potent, mystical stuff. "Be My Witness" is a provocative story about a black man who dares to drive through a white neighborhood; "Shakey’s Gone" gives voice to a slave family who’ve lost their breadwinner. A sad and brutal near-ghost-story set to an ominous throb and narrated in Taylor’s dry, booming voice, "Kitchen Towel" is about a group of displaced, desperate Native Americans who commit suicide rather than return to the reservation, and about how the pain of their deaths lingers in the air like a spirit 40 years later. "House of the Crosses" uses Taylor’s kora-like electric-banjo picking and atmospheric sonics to weave a creepy backdrop for the first-person account of a single-parent child who grows up to be a guard at a prison where one of his charges is his biological father — who is also his mother’s rapist. But all is not gloomy in Otis Land. There’s a jaunty take on Big Joe Williams’s "Baby Please Don’t Go." And the beautiful, mantra-like "Ros" blends that African picking style with potent slide guitar and lyrics that celebrate both the human fuse of the great Montgomery bus strike and the joy of freedom.
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