HOMER (Steinweiss) is one of America’s top session drummers. An essential part of the New York retro soul scene, he’s worked with a veritable who’s who of names, including Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson, Bruno Mars, the Dap Kings, Lee Fields, someone called Adele and many more. He also had his own band, Holly Hive.
Over the last few months he’s released a series of interesting “solo” singles, promising an eventual LP and said album, ‘Ensatina’ is released this Friday, 15th November. We believe that an ensatina is a sort of salamander – as the art work above also suggests. We’re not told why Mr S has given his album that title but we’re told that before making this new music, our man was going through some tough emotional times. His band broke up and a long term personal relationship came to an end leaving Homer in a dark place. He acknowledges that with medical help and support from friends and family he made it through. Homer rebuilt his life and maybe he’d read that a salamander can rebuild its physical limbs – hence the album’s title?
That’s just my guess but it doesn’t really matter. It’s the music that matters and across the 10 tracker, the skinsman delivers a varied musica menu which his PR team rightly describe as a mix of funk, psychedelia, soul, jazz and folk and from a drummer-led LP, it’s never self-indulgent – so don’t expect, long tedious drum solos. Rather you get a music that sees the artist striving to find himself in an ever complex tide of emotional challenges and to help him explore the problems he uses a team of special vocalists – people like Kirby, Hether, girl maned Golden and Minova.
Amongst the tracks that hit home are ‘Deep Sea’ (one of the pre-released singles) the melancholic ‘Start Select’ and the soul ballad ‘Forever and Ever and Ever and Ever’. The album’s real oddity is ‘Racecar Driver’. A duet between Hether and Kirby, it’s psychedelic mixing of genres adding to thus album’s intrigue.
(BB) 3/5
