BOBBY BLAND: YEARS OF TEARS
(1993)
1) Somewhere Between Right
& Wrong; 2) There's A Stranger In My House; 3) Hole In The Wall; 4) Years
Of Tears To Go; 5) Hurtin' Time Again; 6) I Just Tripped On A Piece Of Your
Broken Heart; 7) Sweet Lady Love; 8) Love Of Mine; 9) I've Got To Have Your
Love Tonight; 10) You Put The Hurt On A Hurtin' Man.
It takes serious experience, and a large pot of
desire to waste your time and strength on something as strange as that, to
track and mark down all the tiny mood fluctuations from one late period Bobby
Bland album to another (and with a little less politeness, you could scratch
«late period»). Being neither experienced nor desirous, I can only say that I vaguely suspect a relative fall back
into the somber and the tragic on the appropriately named Years Of Tears. Whether it is simply an astute artistic move or the
whole thing was triggered by something personal, I do not know. The important
thing is, there's a lot of hurting to go through on this album, and, as usual,
it is not being gone through all that convincingly.
Changes to the old formula involve... nothing — the most «different» thing on
the entire album is the little old-school echoey arpeggio that introduces
ʽSomewhere Between Right & Wrongʼ, immediately to become a nice, but
totally ordinary Fifties-progression-based soul number. ʽYears Of Tears To Goʼ
and ʽI Just Tripped On A Piece Of Your Broken Heartʼ (gotta love those titles
that Bobby's sidemen seem to be generating for him on an algorithmic basis) are
two more long, deluxe shows of the spirit, and the rest is more or less evenly
split between sentimental ballads and angry 12-bar stuff (of which ʽHole In The
Wallʼ, about Bobby's party-loving partner, is probably the tightest and the
most lyrically suggestive, but, as usual, that ain't saying much). ʽYou Put The
Hurt On A Hurtin' Manʼ has a poppier and, therefore, more memorable chorus but
not much of a hurtin' atmosphere, despite repeating the word twice in the same
title.
Other than that, the only thing there is to say
is that Bobby cuts down on the snorting a little bit — I may be off, not having
done the proper calculations and all, but it seems as if, on the whole, those
animal noises have been somewhat subdued. Whether this is a sign of increased
modesty, or just advanced age, I have no idea.
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