I See Hawks In L.A.
Album: Mystery Drug
Label: Blue Rose
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.iseehawks.com/

I do feel that artists are often in a "dammed if you do, dammed if you don't" situation with their records. If produce something radically different from your previous release you risk alienating your fans which is fine if you are a global superstar but potential career suicide if you are of more modest means but, copy an earlier success and the 'by numbers' cliché comes out. The answer is, usually, to strike a balance between too much change and not enough.

This is just what I See Hawks In L.A. have done with Mystery Drug their follow up to last years A New Kind of Lonely. The change, the tweak - that little bit extra - is supplied from the pair of guest pedal steel guitarists: Rick Shea plays on 4 tracks including the opener Oklahoma's Going Dry and Pete Grant on If You Remind Me.

The album was cut live in just two days (trademark harmony vocals and the guest players were added later) which shows through in the records immediacy. A longer process may well have seen the throw-away Stop Driving Like An Asshole thrown away.

One Drop Of Human Blood could have come from the pen of The Handsome Family's Rennie Sparks and if you see country music as the honest record of the worker surviving the mundane while trying to catch a break, then We Could All Be In Laughlin Tonight is one of the finest written in the past decade.

Mystery Drug is, arguably, even better than A New Kind of Lonely - and I cannot praise it higher than that.

John 'The Jacket' Hawes