You are hereAlbum Review: Meschiya Lake and the Little Big House - Lucky Devil (Self Release)
Album Review: Meschiya Lake and the Little Big House - Lucky Devil (Self Release)
Never judge a book by its cover – that's what we're always told, anyway. And if we're to apply the same old cliché to long playing records, then surely LUCKY DEVIL by Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns isn't the good old fashioned New Orleans jazz/blues album that its cover would have us believe.
Thankfully, the contents are exactly what you'd expect, and much more. Thanks to the talents of that striped-stockinged, tattooed bar-room beauty on the cover, along with the timeless Dixieland sound of the Little Big Horns, this is nothing short of a steaming bowl of red hot Creole gumbo with a glass of bourbon on the side.
Somehow, sliding this debut album from New Orleans-based Lake and her band into a CD player seems too much of a newfangled thing to do to a record that really ought to be spinning beneath the needle of a gramophone. Indeed, there are moments on this album – on I'm Alone Because I Love You and Lucky Devil, for example – when you'd be forgiven for thinking that Meschiya's voice was being fed into one of Thomas Edison's early phonograph cylinders. As for the 'Sox' Wilson song Gimme a Pigfoot - well, not even Nina Simone (who covered this in 1966) dared to edge as close to that thirties sound as Meschiya does on this outstanding track.
To add to the authenticity of the album, Lake and her band have chosen songs by Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and, of course, Bessie Smith, whose ghost lingers distinctly within the roomy echo of this, at times eerily atmospheric, record. There's also a couple of self-penned numbers from Lake that just go to prove, along with the rest of this gem of a record, that no flood nor new century can subdue the spirit of New Orleans.
Liam Wilkinson
Northern Sky
