Gregg Allman's Low Country Blues Review

Gregg Allman is one of my favorite performers.  He’s lived a rough and hardy life and every bump and bruise pulses from his fingers and thrives in his voice.  Gregg’s latest solo album — Low Country Blues — is available today, and I can tell you right now, this is my favorite Blues album of the young year, and I can’t imagine any other Blues effort beating this collection of music for the next decade.  Yes, it’s just that good.

Gregg Allman is in fine form.  His entire musical being is yearning, mourning and searching for context and existential meaning — and he finds some answers for sharing in the depths of The Blues.

“Low Country Blues” is just that — a brackish salutation of backwoods country life — founded right in the bloody backbay bayous where The Blues was born.  You feel as if you are sitting on a porch on a rainy August evening and Gregg sidles right up next to you plucking and plinking and strumming the truth of his life.

What you learn from Gregg Allman is that the want to live is a magnificent force that bends time against you and compresses compunction and punishes impulse.

“Floating Bridge” starts off the album with a blaze of passion.  “Devil Got My Woman” is a soulful, selfish, repudiation against loss.  “My Love is Your Love” is a melancholy tribute to slovenly human compassion.

Here’s a fine behind-the-scenes video of Gregg rehearsing the song he wrote with Warren Haynes — “Just Another Rider” — for the album:

Now that we’ve celebrated Gregg Allman and his “Low Country Blues” — I want to take a moment to flay Amazon again.

I usually buy my music from iTunes, but “Low Country Blues” was not available as an iTunes download early this morning — though the album now appears to be set for purchase in iTunes for $13.00USD — so, I turned to Amazon and, for around $8.00USD, I was able to purchase the MP3s for the album.

Since I’m on a Mac, I have to use the “Amazon MP3 Downloader” to get the songs on my computer.

The download appeared to start fine.

Then, after repeated fits and spits and crashes and bangs, and a multiplicity of restarts, the Amazon Downloader got stuck.

Or did it?

This screenshot suggests that the Amazon Downloader successfully downloaded the album at least THREE TIMES.

What a mess.

I had to delete the duplicates after doing a files compare to make sure I was keeping the full song and not part of an aborted Amazon attempt.

I longed for the transparent simplicity of iTunes.

That said, don’t let Amazon get you down on buying your copy of Gregg Allman’s “Low Country Blues” — the album is definitely worth a few Amazon pukes and spikes — and the melodies will live inside you forever.