Alabama 3 follow up their 2021 album ‘Step 13’, which was their tribute to the passing of Jake Black, aka The Very Reverend D. Wayne Love with their fourteenth studio album ‘Cold War Classics Vol.2.` As per usual, this Acid house, electronic trip hop, country, blues band whose spiritual home is in Brixton, South London have created an album that retains a mix of political and social commentary.
We are introduced to this latest release with `Goodbye Glasnost` a soundbite which hints at the concept relating to openness and transparency, popularised by Mikhail Gorbachev as a political slogan for increased government transparency in the Soviet Union in the mid-eighties. There`s a late-night soulful texture to `Before The Ship Came In` which despite it`s easy going vibe seems to possibly hint at global unease. The backing vocals add a delightful poignancy to this track.
`Get On This One` is a wonderfully retro funky offering with some stunning horns, synths, a guiding drum rhythm and harmonic backing vocals, Alabama 3 at their best. What sounds like DJ record scratching leads us into `California Got You Stoned` which is like a companion piece to `Woke Up This Morning` and it felt at times as if I were experiencing a religious experience.
`Influencer Intro` is a brief soundbite and a launch towards `The Influencer Blues` which hints at the dangers of internet influencers such as Andrew Tate and all the misogyny, homophobia and racism spouted by similar on the worldwide web. A difficult subject but shared in a kind of Cuban danzón-mambocha or cha cha cha style with i`m sure a nod to The Strangler`s `Nuclear Device`
`(I Can`t) Keep Calm and Carry On` evolves into a trippy number that has a captivating pulsing dance rhythm with lyrical content that appears to associate the dangers of music and drug dependency / culture. A delightfully hypnotic foot tapper. Dominic Chianese, aka Uncle Junior from The Sopranos adds his vocals to the dreamy, philosophical musing `If I`d Never Seen The Sunshine` where we enjoy haunting harmonica tinges and has towards the end a gorgeous pedal steel guitar solo.
`North Korea` opens with a snippet of a speech in Korean, I assume, possibly kim jong un before it veers off into a tongue-in-cheek tale of a man attempting to woo his lover with food from all over the world before finally resorting in desperation to North Korean cuisine. A surrealistic discourse communicated over an absorbing trippy dance consistency with horns sprinkled throughout. Lampedusa, the largest island of the Italian Pelagie Islands in the Mediterranean is namechecked in the title of `The Girl With Lampedusa In Her Eyes` as sadly a five-month-old boy drowned during a rescue operation off the island after a boat carrying people from north Africa capsized. A number that muses on refugees seeing what life can offer elsewhere on televisions in war torn bombed out buildings shared over a complementing musical soundscape.
`Thank You` is a spacy tongue in cheek bewitching, gyrating aural presentation with a condemnation on the government and the state of the UK and quite possibly the threat of globalisation. Laurel and Hardy’s perceptive message “it’s another mess you got me into” becomes a strapline at times throughout. The album closes out with `The Road Goes On Forever` is a fairly expressive deliberation built around a couple of characters and the life choices they make and associated consequences thereafter. A bouncy euphonic mellow musical resonance adds to this interesting rumination.
Rob Spragg a.k.a. Larry Love describes ‘Cold War Classics Vol.2.` as “a trip to that warm place in your mind where spying on your neighbour was de rigueur and fallout shelter ballads and Checkpoint Charlie funk ruled the airwaves.”
It`s all that and more. A soulful, trippy, techno, country-tinged blues outing delivering fifty minutes of aural pleasure wrapped up with social commentary with a political bite. The band take this release on the road later this month….need I say more.
Rating 9 /10
