Review: Seasick Steve ‘A Trip a Stumble a Fall Down on Your Knees’
By Hal Horowitz
“Awww, cmon now….yeah that’s right.”
Those are the first words Seasick Steve gleefully snarls on the opening track of his first release in four years, A Trip a Stumble a Fall Down on Your Knees, out June 7. And right there, as the swamp infested Creedence-infused tune “Move to the Country” grinds into third gear, it’s clear this guy is for real.
But otherwise, it’s hard to know what is factual and not about Steve. There is so much written about the folk/blues veteran’s early life, it’s impossible to tell truth from fiction. At least that’s the case with the years before he cracked the UK market in 2006 by delivering a career-making performance playing his battered three-string guitar on Jools Holland’s television show.
Just glancing at album titles provides some idea of what Steve Wold (that may not even be his official last name) is about. From 2004s debut Cheap, to 2006s Dog House Music, through the humorous but probably true I Started Out With Nothin’ and Still Got Most of It Left (2008), into Hubcap Music, You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks, Keepin’ the Horse Between Me and the Ground and perhaps his most candid one, 2009s Man From Another Time, you get a sense of this idiosyncratic player’s self-deprecating wit.
All of these and more have appeared in just the past few decades. That’s when Steve took his gutbucket Mississippi bayou rocking roots music to crossover audiences at large outdoor concerts, many of whom may not have heard blues as raw and honest as what he ladles out. In 2007 alone he played more UK festivals than any other artist. Along the way he has worked with names as diverse as John Lee Hooker, Modest Mouse, KT Tunstall, John Paul Jones, and Jack White, the latter released Steve’s 2011 album on his Third Man imprint.
He’s as comfortable recording and playing solo as with full band and delivers his uncut blues, rock and folk in a variety of guises. On A Trip A Stumble A Fall Down on Your Knees, he takes a 180 degree turn from 2020s solo acoustic collection, appropriately called Blues in Mono. The other offering that year mixed rocking, plugged-in blues rock with a few stripped down backwoods folk entries.
For all but one of these dozen tracks, Steve stays plugged-in. A combination of musicians support him as he shifts from the noir, late night, jazz influenced “Trip and a Stumble,” which resembles something from Willy DeVille’s catalog, to stomping Led Zeppelin-tailored monsters like “Soul Food.” In between he throws in a splendid “Stormy Monday”-styled slow blues, enhanced by female backing soul singers, about his love for West Coast music (“San Francisco Sound”), a roiling, rumbling serving of Hooker-ized goodness (“Let the Music Talk”) with John Bonham-inflected stomping and even a plate full of funk (“Funky Music”) that expands his deeper blues mindset into fresh territory. And there is a tasty helping of North Mississippi throbbing RL Burnside-inspired thump and bump, most obvious on the driving boogie of “Backbone Slip.”
Everything is propelled by a gruff Billy F. Gibbons grumble, so prominent when he barks out “Have moicy!” you think Steve will break into “La Grange” at any moment. Lyrically, he’s old-school, singing about getting rid of mobile phones (“Move to the Country”), ditching the Internet (“Internet Cowboys”) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYj13UevFK0 and listening to music on vinyl (“Let the Music Talk”). No surprises there. The production is tight and vibrant but with enough rough edges to keep the groove cutting.
But it’s his honest, gutsy, intensity that keeps this set, which he considers his best, blazing until the closing slow burn, lovely ballad “Elisabeth,” enriched by Mickey Raphael’s crying harmonica. He sounds like he’s having as much fun concocting this bluesy feast as you will have devouring it.
Pre-order the album Here
“Funky Music”
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