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• MUSIC REVIEW (Country) •

Slo' Tom Liquor's My Lover Artist Home Page Furnaceface / Slo' Tom Home Page Buy It Now at TuneVault.com

Label: Upright Records Released: 11/26/1999

The idea of playing country music when you've lived a completely urban existence has always interested me. How is it that these guys spend years at the big city's School of Punk and Funk or Academy of Glitter and Pop, to end up in black Sunday best singing slow and low?

After listening to the raw tapes of Slo's first release, it all came into focus. Real folk or country music is more than trucks, campfires and beat-up guitars. It's about telling stories with high-on-impact, low-on-abstract lyrics - simple stories that tell us about ourselves and allow us to laugh at the same time. Aside from being a big fan of the form, I imagine Slo' took to country music because sentiments can travel from the stage to the floor direct and clear.

Recording a live, unpolished CD as his first is appropriate. He tells the stories, the people listen, the people cheer. It also took balls, but Slo' has never been short of those. From the story of a man who spirals (without arm-twisting) into a world of booze: "The Bottle Made Me an Offer," to "The One I Love is Not My Lover," the lament of a man committed to the wrong woman, there is something here for all of us.

So thanks Slo', we raise a glass to the new CD and sit back, listen to your stories and learn. Because, as Cowboy Bix Bender says, "Good judgement comes from experience and a lot of that comes from bad judgement.”

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