June 9 2025 - review- What's the Matter, M Ross? M Ross Perkins (Five out of five stars) The clarion call of the 70s jangling rock guitars, harmony and melody drenched songs blasts at you from the first few moments of M Ross Perkins new album and the opening song, ‘Hey Man/Hey Self’. The art of getting that great stuff up front on an album as a “hello”, “greetings”, “here we are” was perfected in the 70s and carries on to this day in this new album released this past month. It needs to be clear that the newfound musical adornments of the era gone by, fully represented here, inspire this guy, his modern view and presentation shining bright. It isn’t a nostalgia exercise. It’s like Hendrix stylings… they were new, they were amazing, exciting, perfectly suited to present tight pop rock songs and they remain so when you hear them in new work. There are some artists like Lenny Kravitz who, to my ear, mimic the sounds of the time but I suspect it’s because I don’t particularly care for the songs themselves, leaving me only with the retro stylings. I have to say this because I’ve recently been reading and hearing people say that albums of the 60s and 70s don’t sound great because the technology wasn’t there. That is a profoundly stupid thing to state, especially when you can listen to any of them any day and hear absolutely stunning audio fidelity. In case that’s not enough proof of the dopiness of those remarks, I was around then and can assure you the studios and engineers were so excited because the recorded music industry made technological leaps constantly and it all came to a head in the 1960s. Production of those albums from which this album takes its own brilliance was top notch. This is a powerful sounding record. This album has four spoken interludes throughout, and I have to say, in many, many albums I love, they don’t work. It’s risky, but Perkins nails it here. I don’t think a lot of artists understood and they’d come off as jarring inauthentic attempts at authenticity. These in this album are used to fuse the album’s overall theme, dare I say, “concept” from a third person perspective while M. Ross talks about it from the first person. That different perspective and their brevity are perfect segues. That’s another thing I love that he gets right that a lot of artists try but don’t- the concept album. I personally think Tommy by The Who is not great. There are plenty of classic songs in the album that are fantastic, but as a concept, it’s ridiculous. I felt that way when I first heard it in the 70s and today. Ray Davies of the Kinks tried his hand at somewhere near a dozen “concept” albums and frankly, a hand full of those are masterpieces and the rest semi-disasters-nothing in between. Trying to wrap a dozen separate tight pop rock songs together into a whole conceptually is almost certainly hard to write and as hard to perform and sequence. This album does the job beautifully. You can tell because it’s fun to listen to the songs separately, but great fun to listen to the entire work. Oh, and the only way that works is if there aren’t any songs we’d want to skip because they are a weak link. This album is filled with excellent songs, flawless lyrics and catchy melodies. Nothing to skip here. You need to conceive of buying it right away and then act on it properly, just like he does in “What’s the Matter, M Ross?” -Louie Lala
June 9 2025 -review- Salvadore Ross self-titled 2024 When my friends and I were recording a number of songs I’d written they regularly expressed concern that they’d all have the same “sound” whether that be hard rock, psychedelia, rockabilly, whatever. They could never quite express exactly the sameness that worried them. My response was always the same- what’s wrong with that? CCR’s recordings all sound very similar, familiar from beginning to end. The Doors never veered from their “sound.” I’m not comparing myself to either of those masters, I’m merely revealing that sounding the same can be a very powerful tool in a recording artist’s works, not a problem. I suspect they were suffering from Beatle Brain, wherein each session had to produce something that sounded totally different in every way. Salvatore Ross obviously knows how potent is offering a consistent aural experience. All three of their albums are drenched in reverb, something I have always had a weakness for, and have helped make them marvelous examples of a mixture of shoe gazer, hard rock, jam, and psychedelia, blended to perfection. It’s haunting, exhilarating, majestic simultaneously. The lyrics fading in and out of clarity ala REM’s early days, add a mystical quality to the journey. In order to accommodate the contemplative, expansive sound, only one song is in the three minute range, the usual pop rock length, the rest of the numbers coming in mostly in the four to six minute area, which suits them beautifully. I don’t mean to insinuate these guys can’t rock. Greenhouse, in this collection, certainly does, as does Edacity on Mystery Head and Say What you Know or Love All Around on Transfiguration. As I say, it’s a glorious mixture of different elements, all of which I dearly love. The production is superb, as is the song writing, typical of these guys. You can get their catalog most conveniently on the ever-great Bandcamp.com and I highly recommend you do so! This is the kind of band that makes a person excited, anticipating when an album is ready to release. -Louie Lala
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