Like a good foot massage, the dulcet tones of RAY LAMONTAGNE never fail to soothe the senses and calm the nerves.
His enigmatically titled second album “Till the Sun Turns Black” is a real joy to listen to. It is tonnes better than his previous effort, with the songs lending themselves to the lullaby-quality of Lamontagne’s breathy vocals, which can flip from soft ‘n’ gentle, to angry and soulful: enough to rival even the most hardened blues singer.
The album, which was first released in the US back in August 2006, opens with the magnificent Scott Walker-inspired ‘Be Here Now’, a psychedelic heady six minutes of musical space travel, complete with airy string arrangements and subterranean piano licks. It sets the tone of the album, with wave after pulsing wave of beautiful noise that washes over the listener’s head, drenching their brain.
The slow and sexy “Barfly” is reminiscent of Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the Wild Side”, but is slightly more romantic. In fact, LaMontagne’s husky, rasping vocals breathing “Kiss me before you go/I’m going nowhere lately” into your ears was enough to turn this writer’s knees to jelly, and certainly got the old butterflies in the stomach going. Sigh…
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But before I go all ‘Mills n Boon’, we’ll move on to talk about something with a little more funk. In particular “Three More Days”, a fabulous hip-wiggle-inducing Mowtown number, and the Raunchy as Hell “You Can Bring Me Flowers”, a down and dirty blues track where LaMontangne really shows off what he can do with his vocals. And here they throw in a seriously groovy flute solo. Never a bad thing in our book.
“Till The Sun Turns Black” encompasses a satisfying variety of styles: blues, indie, soul, folk, you name it he sings it. The songs are reliably decent, and LaMontagne’s gorgeous voice made this writer all giddy and girly. But he still manages to maintain enough grinding guitars, blues and soul to keep the boys interested as well. Great stuff indeed.
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