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 Chris Rea Samples Auberge (audio only) Looking for the Summer The Road to Hell Blue Cafe
And yet he's had a highly successful twenty-five year career in Europe. And he's sold about 30 million CDs, mostly in Europe. And --- how is this for irony? --- it won't do you much good to fall in love with Chris Rea and hope to see him in concert because he's stopped touring and now says he'll record with a three-piece band under the nondescript name of The Fire Flies. "It's not until you become seriously ill and you nearly die and you're at home for six months that you suddenly realize --- this isn't the way I intended it to be,” he's said. “Everything that you've done falls away and you start wondering why you went through all that rock business stuff." But just listen to Chris Rea, and you'll be glad he spent a quarter century playing sleek, grown-up rock that has two easy-to-spot signatures --- guitars that are fluid as mercury and a voice that sounds as if it's been up all night and doesn't plan to rest any time soon --- even if his style is impossible to pigeonhole. Who is Chris Rea? A master guitarist who didn't pick up a guitar until he was 19. A Brit who learned the blues from records. And a singer-songwriter who, a wag noted, “seemed only to get in the charts when Dire Straits were somewhere else.” Yes, there are echoes of Mark Knopfler in the seamless guitars. A bit of the languor of Knopfler too. But there's something about Rea's music that's idiosyncratic and addictive --- in almost every song, I hear the summer. Blazing sun, burning beach, the tang of lotion mixed with ocean ozone. And time nowhere to be found, time banished. In Rea's pre-global warming world, I feel forever young, fit, in love or about to be. This is sexy, dreamy stuff. With lyrics you'd actually listen to if the music weren't so damn compelling. Organ hotwired to your spine, wicked harmonica, guitar riffs that J.J. Cale would happily steal --- this is the music a lot of us make in our heads and never find in reality. Well, here it is. For Rea's fans, the one irresistible CD is 1991's “Auberge,” which was huge in Europe. Not hard understanding why --- the start of the title song is like nothing you've ever heard before. To wit: A door closes. Boots on stone. Car door slams. Ignition. A guitar trill, building. An organ asks a haunting question. A slide guitar responds. Now the drums kick in. A guitar figure, repeated. Horns. And, at last, that rough voice: On the hard fast train On the road to gain Something gets right through to your telling bone There's a sudden itch An electric twitch Sometimes I swear this body's got a mind of its own If you listen to this much and are not dancing in your seat --- oh, but that's impossible. At any volume, when the horns, guitars and drums are working together, resistance is futile. I've been listening to Chris Rea, on and off, since “Auberge.” Each time, he's a glorious anti-depressant: a grittier Chris Isaak, a raunchier Bryan Ferry. He's good for parties. As subliminal dinner music. To seal an assignation. Or when all you need to time-travel is a whiff of Coppertone. --- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com To buy “Auberge” from Amazon.com, click here. To buy “The Best of Chris Rea” from Amazon.com, click here. Copyright 2007 by Head Butler Inc. |
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