What a difference four years made for Chicago-based blues guitarist\/vocalist Son Seals. His debut effort, The Son Seals Blues Band<\/i>, captured his power with a production quality that can best be called gritty. It wasn\u2019t bad, but it wasn\u2019t polished enough to properly show off Seals\u2019s talent.<\/p>\n
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Midnight Son<\/i>, the second release from Seals on the Alligator label (and its eighth overall release) corrects this. Seals and his backing musicians come through the mix clear as day, making these nine selections the best (to this point) example of just what Seals was capable of.<\/p>\n
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With the opening notes of the first track \u201cI Believe,\u201d Seals quickly locks the listener in, and lets them know they\u2019re going to be taken on a trip whose pace Seals himself will deliver. His soulful vocals, cutting in and out with his guitar work, leave little doubt that Seals could have been \u2013 and should have been \u2013 one of the best-known names in the genre.<\/p>\n
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Midnight Son<\/i> is not strictly a 12-bar blues album. \u201cNo, No Baby\u201d has more than a touch of Memphis rock and soul scattered in the rhythm section, making the track hypnotic and addicting. Likewise, tracks such as \u201cTelephone Angel,\u201d \u201cOn My Knees\u201d and the closer \u201cGoing Back Home\u201d work the listener up into a blues-based frenzy, before gently setting them down and guiding them home.<\/p>\n
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Very little on this disc doesn\u2019t work perfectly, and those rare mis-steps just suggest that Seals might have been reaching a little too far with some of his genre-stretching concepts. \u201cFour Full Seasons Of Love\u201d is a quick-tempo shuffle that, for some reason, just doesn\u2019t take off and soar like many other tracks on this disc do. Still, these occasional hiccups are rare on this album.<\/p>\n
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As much as the better production job from Seals, label founder Bruce Iglauer and Richard McLeese helps the album\u2019s overall power (as does the fact it was recorded at Curtom Studios in Chicago, best known for its work with Curtis Mayfield), sometimes the grittier production style of the previous album tended to bring out the rawness of Seals\u2019s work a little better. It\u2019s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don\u2019t dilemma, to be sure \u2013 but I\u2019ll lean towards favoring the cleaner production work this time around, as it does nothing but benefit the overall band\u2019s sound.<\/p>\n
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Midnight Son<\/i> might have only been Seals\u2019s second full-length effort, but it certainly suggested that he was going to have his work cut out for him in terms of ever hoping to top it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[10741],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-46619","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-son-seals","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46619","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46619"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}