Out now on Melodic/Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation
That’s not to say that borrowing from indie-past is a bad thing, mid eighties indie was generally good and this joint release by Melodic and Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation serves as a wonderful homage to those days gone by whilst still being relevant today. Elsewhere on ‘Getting A Life With’ there’s bits of Orange Juice, The Wedding Present and Aztec Camera. This Many Boyfriends have clearly spent a lot of time listening to mid-eighties indie, ‘I Should Be A Communist’ is heavily influenced by the jangly guitars of the Smiths while the intro to ‘Three Year Itch’ is a deadringer for JAMC’s ‘Just Like Honey’. The second thing I think of is Half Man Half Biscuit and their tongue in cheek lyrics. Kicking off with the brilliant ‘I Don’t Like You (Cos You Don’t Like The Pastels)’ with it’s clever/snobby indie band references, the first thing that crosses my mind is these guys would be useful in my pub quiz team. In my day a record with seven tracks used to be called an album, but in this ever changing world in which we live seven tracks just doesn’t cut it, so an EP it is! The real nail in the coffin though is his voice which sways from over-enunciating every word to a very poor effort at imitating Dr Feelgood’s Lee Brilleaux. And therein lies the problem, despite all the accolades there really is nothing here to make SDP stand out from a pub band, even Robert Johnson’s ‘Cross Road Blues’, a stone cold classic, sounds amateurish.
The most notable song on, and wisely the first single to be taken from the album, is ‘California’ a cover of the Tupac/Dre classic (shouldn’t that be California Love?) which is actually quite different and very good but the rest of the tracks are fairly standard blues songs that a million pub bands up and down the country could play just as well. Way too long at 17 tracks, The Crave features a mixture of self penned tunes and covers. According to his press releases and the blurb in the inlay of his new album, SPD is well a respected blues player – a quote from Classic Rock even goes as far as to say ‘Petit has the fire of Freddie King, the instinct of Jimmy Page and the soul of Clapton’ – a brave statement indeed! The burning question is does ‘The Crave’ match up to expectations?
Stephen Dale Petit (aka SDP) is a blues guitarist originally from Califonia who relocated to London in the late eighties and set himself up as the pioneer of the New Blues Movement (no, me neither).
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