Sweeter Than Honey

Chango was a Puerto-Rican-American band from New York that played Latin Rock similar to the sound of an early Santana (well at least on their first album). This one however has nearly an entirely different band line up and as a result this band's instrumentation is more tightly structured than the jam feel of the first album yet it lacks the fluidity of their debut. There are definitely more standout tracks on this LP than on their debut. The album starts off with the track, "Life Is A Rainbow" an uplifting, cruising tune that sounds like it would be heard blaring out of Cheech's Love Machine. In addition, it includes well-composed, mellow tracks like "The Last Ride" and "Thumbing A Ride". "Meeting of the Gods" is an interesting, amplified build up on "The Last Ride"…

There is only a slight difference between a street-corner blues singer and a sanctified street singer, since both need to hold a crowd and make a few bucks (no matter what they do with the money when the day is done), and as this four-disc collection of so-called guitar evangelists from the 1920s, '30s, and early '50s makes clear, playing slide for the Lord sounds pretty much like playing slide for the other side. If anything, the guitar preachers represented here might be even more out there and eccentric than their secular counterparts, making this box set a delightful addition to the standard country blues record collection. Blind Willie Johnson, the apex of the guitar evangelists, is well represented here with classic late-'20s tracks…

Jackie Lomax, who began his career as the lead singer and bass player for Liverpool’s the Undertakers in the mid-'60s, has always had a soulful voice, a bit like his contemporary Steve Winwood (the two actually also look strikingly similar), but his considerable talent never translated as well as Winwood’s into international commercial success. But the quality was always there, as this interesting two-disc set clearly shows. The first disc collects singles and demos from the Lomax Alliance (the Undertakers essentially morphed into the Lost Souls and then into the Lomax Alliance) as well as some Lomax solo releases tracked in 1966 and 1967, including seldom-heard gems like “Peaches ‘N Cream,” “Try as You May,” “Don’t You Think It’s Time,” and “Sweeter Than Honey,” all of which combine blue-eyed soul with a kind of British Invasion template.