At first glance, this doesn't have much going for it. There's the band's name to start. Then there's the fact that Derek Trucks appears to be a young, old-fashioned guitar hero and has a long, irritating pony-tail. You can see the pony-tail in a photo on the album which shows him sitting on a camp chair in the desert, guitar poised, with his back to the camera while the rest of the band walks adoringly up a slope toward him. That irritated me as well. And then he latches on to Aboriginal songlines and quotes Bruce Chatwin on the subject, who, while a brilliant writer, wasn't known for sticking to the facts about anything when it didn't suit him.So it was just as well that I heard the music on the Jazz and Conversation blog before I was exposed to any of the above. I suppose it's mostly jazz or blues with, inevitably, horror of horrors, some jazz-rock, and there is an air of nostalgia hanging over the whole thing, stemming from the style rather than the content, which is nearly all up-beat. I'm sure I heard something like it when I was in college but I can't think what it was. However, it's all tightly played, only sinks into self-indulgence on the Indian-influenced track, Sahib Teri Bandi, and has loads of strong melodies. I knew there had to be a reason I keep playing it.
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