The fifth album from Old Californio out of San Gabriel Valley in Southern California serves up some classic country via three originals and ten cover tunes.
At the core of the band are songwriter and lead singer Rich Dembowski and Woody Aplanalp on guitar. Shorten Your List is by Dembowski, I Say That Too was written by Aplanalp and bassist John Avila contributed I Won’t Cry.
The other ten tracks are a largely unsuccessful hotchpotch of covers that range from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones to West Coast country rock.
Overly sanitised versions of John Prine’s The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness and Knockin’ On Your Screen Door rub shoulders with Merle Haggard’s Lonesome Fugitive and Guy Clark’s Stuff That Works. The objective appears to be to emphasize the universal quality of these classic songs but, in the process, the raw authenticity of the originals is lost.
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A Bluegrass version of Lennon and McCartney’s Because is just plain hideous and a makeover of Jagger/Richards’ Wild Horses doesn’t fare much better.
Since Little Feat’s Willin’ and Neil Young’s Lotta Love are both fairly laid back pieces, the prettifying Californiocation of them does less damage. One must be thankful the band didn’t take on any punk songs!
Given that the mellow melodies of the three original pieces are the album’s highlights, one wonders why the band didn’t simply trust their own song writing abilities more.
Old Californio on Bandcamp
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