Shades of a Blue Orphanage ( + 9 bonus tracks)

Three years ago I witnessed some musicians playing a street corner in Dublin's Temple Bar; under the stars there was chucka-wocca guitar, tablas, bouncy meaty bass - a sound from the same whiff of Peter Green's 'End of the Game' or better still, something Thin Lizzy hope to achieve here. Sometimes they inhale deeply and breathe 'Buffalo Gal' and 'Brought Down' back out, other times, they can only laughably cough the heavy fumes back up - 'I Don't Want to Forget How to Jive', what Elvis would have sounded like if his prescriptions came from the gutter instead of certified practitioners. Dragging their feet through a really heavy studio atmosphere lets some corkers go astray here, 'Call the Police' fizzing with the attitude we wouldn't find until about 1974, until then it's beards, lumberjack shirts, Bader Meinhoff complex jeans and art school connotations, Eric Bell’s nimble fingers too derivative to be anything more than generic, Phil’s poetic fancies chained to his local dancehall, Downey lost between the two.