T-Model Ford
She Ain’t None Of Your’n
(Fat Possum)
Robert Belfour
What’s Wrong With You
(Fat Possum)
The venerable Fat Possum label is a precious thing indeed, mainly because of its unconscious beauty: press releases and websites aside, this label (and, even more importantly, its artists) seem utterly oblivious to any sort of blues audience or what they might expect. When these backwoods geniuses do the one-four-five, it’s because that’s just what came OUT. Seldom in this over-marketed millennial world does any record label exhibit such a completely charming lack of self-recognition.
The latest two releases from Oxford bear that out. T-Model Ford sounds like he wandered up on the stage on open mike night and started telling woman stories, while Robert Belfour comes off the same way, except on your back porch when he thought you weren’t home. This approach, unknowing as it is, does have a few drawbacks—you’d better like sloppiness and simplicity, or you can look elsewhere. When Belfour throws out a song like “My Baby’s Gone,” you can bet that’s all the information he’s going to give out. Same goes with Ford’s one-riff, one-phrase wonder “She Asked Me So I Told Her.”
The all-acoustic charms of Belfour reside placidly in the shadow of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Junior Kimbrough (whose “Black Mattie” and “Done Got Old” get fine readings here). His country charms are all his own on the minor classic “Norene,” which is ethereal enough to start off with a good minute of Delta picking and real enough to have him worried about the woman himself (“As long as I don’t get her name out there in the public,” you can hear him say to someone as the track begins). The whole thing gets sepia-toned with the last three tracks: “Norene,” “Holding My Pillow,” and “Bad Luck,” which feel like Belfour’s not getting old so much as fading away.
The all-electric, no-bass, streamlined T-Model Ford is doing it all himself for the most part on “She Ain’t None Of Your’n,” backed by an array of drummers and keyboard mainstay Frank Frost on two tracks. The tribal “Take A Ride With Me” and the Saturday Night Fish Fry of “Junk” stand out in their clattering anarchy, but practically any track sucks you right into a place where feedback and groove aren’t just good ideas, they’re the law. And when it all comes together with the mystery train grind of “Mother’s Gone,” the four walls of the studio disappear and you’re left with a field recording that just happened to have come in out of the rain. That is, until the advertisement comes in at the end for T Model’s other CDs, but even that is just a guy shouting almost incoherently into a microphone. Some folks can’t even sell out right—thank God!
