As a genre, Americana offers a big tent, encompassing roots music that may include strands of rock, country, blues, folk, and other distinctly American styles. Long Island\u2019s Pete Mancini is an artist whose range lets him to cover much of the territory inside that big tent. His former band Butchers Blind favored the blues-rock element of Americana, while his 2017 solo debut Foothill Freeway<\/i> went all in on country-folk. With his latest solo disc Flying First Class<\/i>, Mancini locates a happy medium, sharing a sprinkling of all of the above across the nine tunes found here.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a natural thing to do for a singer-songwriter who\u2019s already proven he has the instincts and skills to handle all of the above. While Mancini\u2019s vocals tend to remind of Jeff Tweedy\u2014often plaintive, often laconic\u2014on this particular set, his songs feel more like the sort of thing Johnny Cash and Roger McGuinn might have co-written with Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne: jangly country-rock tunes that often feature hard-living characters, but are infused with contemporary sensibilities, witty punchlines and earnest melancholy.<\/p>\n
Opener \u201cPine Box Derby\u201d establishes a common theme for several of the songs to come: regret. Starting out with just Mancini\u2019s voice and acoustic, it delves into a dreamy, bittersweet memory from the narrator\u2019s childhood, a moment of connection with a father who\u2019s now gone, leaving behind a dark legacy: \u201cIt hurts like hell to lose someone you love \/ It\u2019s worse when you\u2019re cursed with a hand-me-down crutch.\u201d As the intensity builds, Cassandra House comes in with gorgeous harmony vocals and Mancini adds electric guitar and piano, but never a rhythm section, leaving the underlying tension in both the music and the lyric unresolved.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy Hometown\u201d opens up with classic Byrdsian chiming guitars and a nostalgic-feeling sketch of said hometown, suggesting a fond memory right up until the chorus reveal: the narrator can\u2019t wait to get out of town. \u201cIt\u2019s such a drag, think I\u2019m sinking down \/ My hometown, my hometown \/ I\u2019d rather be dead in the ground than drop roots in my hometown.\u201d (Ouch.) Bitterness turns to bitter laughter as \u201cCease And Desist\u201d arrives, offering an upbeat, tongue-in-cheeky number about a hard-working bar-band player receiving the dreaded C&D letter from a rival. \u201cWe got lawyers on the way, just stop today \/ What\u2019s mine is mine and not yours anymore.\u201d <\/p>\n
Mancini goes straight-up honky-tonk for the similarly winking \u201cDUI Blues\u201d before tripling down on the liquor-themed tunes with the full-on electric blues \u201cSLA Check\u201d (SLA being State Liquor Authority). \u201cBack in Bakersfield\u201d tells another tale of a guy stuck in a town he\u2019s dying to get out of, though this one offers novelistic detail in place of snark, and features nice banjo work from co-writer Buddy Woodward. \u201cCasino Lights\u201d is a rather wistful mid-tempo number whose chorus offers a simple but perceptive summation: \u201cCasino lights \/ Never seem as bright in hindsight.\u201d<\/p>\n
The album closes with a strong one-two punch. First title track \u201cFlying First Class\u201d delivers a driving, playful roots-rocker featuring rollicking piano and a snappy lyric mocking the pretensions of the first class crowd. At 2:18, it\u2019s tight and tart. In terms of contrast, it\u2019s the perfect lead-in to closer \u201cThe Day I Stopped Running,\u201d a truly gorgeous acoustic ballad in which our narrator maybe, possibly, finally finds a moment of peace and clarity: \u201cRegret twists the night \/ It\u2019s been chasin\u2019 me down my whole life \/ The day I stopped running \/ Is the day I ran into you.\u201d It\u2019s sublime, and the clear highlight of the album for this listener.<\/p>\n
Backed by compadres Mick Hargreaves (bass & harmony vocals), Alex Sarkis (drums) and Buddy Woodward (guitars, banjo, mandolin), Mancini covers guitars as well as some bass and piano, while also self-producing the album with assistance from Hargreaves (engineering and mixing on all but two tracks) and Bill Herman (the other two). The sound is straightforward and uncluttered, just Pete and the gang doing their thing with no frills or gimmicks.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a perfect fit for an album that manages to be both thoroughly unpretentious and subtly ambitious. Flying First Class<\/i> might be on the brief side at 36 minutes, but Mancini explores a rich palette of sounds across these nine tracks, infusing each with an authentic love for roots music and the tools it offers to tell tales of people facing down troubles of all kinds with little more than heart and grit to get themselves by.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":33779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[9972],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-45600","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-pete-mancini","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45600"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}