Album Notes

The Luvpuppets
By JEAN McDERMOTT
AKThisMonth

To read the full review go to
http://luvpuppets.com/_wsn/page2.html

[This] Anchorage-based, roots rock band features four guys of wildly divergent interests yet the music just seems to click.

The simple joy of playing music comes through on each original cut. Danceable, high-energy, entertaining numbers: There’s one ballad, one reggae number and one, well, ominous Christensen-penned cut, “Bad Times.” “Don’t bother me/ Don’t you give me them rules/ Don’t swim out too far from ground/ The undertow gonna’ drag you down/ A fool befriends a fool he ends a fool/ I ain’t talking to you.” Other songs explore street people, love lost and gained, and then there’s Lillard’s anguished homage to the late bluesman Roy Buchanan. “I’ve been down/ But I ain’t never been down like he was/ I’ve been down/ But I ain’t never been dead, locked in a cage.” Lillard said he worked on the song for 15 years until he figured out how to sum up Buchanan’s influence. “Buchanan died in 1989, hung himself in a jail cell in northern Virginia. It was a tragedy. He was such an incredibly guitar player. I got to see him a couple times.

Buchanan’s influences loom heavily on “The Return,” but so do Chuck Berry, a bit of Nick Lowe, some Neil Young, blues, David Lindley and the Grateful Dead.