Search - Craig Chambers :: West by Southwest

Comfortably out of step

Jerome Clark | Canby, Minnesota | 02/15/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"With West by Southwest, Craig Chambers, ably assisted by Tom Morrell and the Time Warp Tophands, delivers a pure in-the-tradition Western swing recording. This isn't the big-band stuff you'll hear from, say, Asleep at the Wheel. Spare and almost entirely acoustic, it still manages to swing with easygoing assurance. It'll remind you, in case you've forgotten, why you liked Western swing in the first place. Chambers, who has a pleasing cowboy-jazz crooner's voice, draws on influences that range from Bob Wills to the Sons of the Pioneers, but he never comes across as anybody's pale imitator. When he sings "I'm out of step in this modern age," he is stating the obvious, but his soul dwells comfortably in that earlier musical era (roughly the 1930s through the 1950s). He eschews Western-swing standards, finding songs just as good but a lot less well known -- one reason why this CD, despite its surface old-shoe familiarity, always sounds fresh. My favorite cut, Michael Fleming's "High Sonoita," stands out as one of those rare tunes that could be done convincingly by either an ersatz Hollywood-cowboy singer like Gene Autry or a gritty Western realist like Ian Tyson. A good, solidly executed record, West by Southwest gets better every time you hear it. In his own modest, understated way, Craig Chambers delivers the goods."