Alabama 3 Exile on Coldharbour Lane

South London genre-blending story tellers Alabama 3 return with a new album on Submarine Cat Records.

With an impressive run of hits in the '80s – thanks to a country sound washed in a sleek, pop sheen and with enough rock dynamics to put it all over – Alabama built an early template for how to be a country group in the 21st century. They had chart hits in three different decades, a pretty impressive lesson in longevity in a business that hardly encourages it. This well-sequenced set features some of the group’s most enduring songs, including “I’m in a Hurry (And Don’t Know Why),” “Song of the South,” and “Mountain Music,” among others, and makes it easy to hear why Alabama was so ubiquitous in the genre.

This disc is an integral part of a series Telarc is doing – taking albums that were big sellers by prominent artists and having an innovative group of solid blues players do their interpretations of a variety of the songs from the original album. They have done this with the Beatles' White Album (calling it The Blues White Album) and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde with good success, which will probably continue with this new interpretation of the Stones' 1972 vintage album. Telarc put together a dynamite "house" band, including Brian Stoltz (ex-Neville Brothers) on guitar and former Double Trouble rhythm section members Tommy Shannon and Chris Layton, and then pulled in many more celebrated artists to handle the leads. the Stones, who started out as a blues and R&B band, always maintained those roots; thus, many of the songs keep their original shape. This is a solid retooling of this classic Stones LP. Telarc has taken the original double disc and picked the songs the artists felt remained truest to their respective traditions and packaged it as a ten-song disc, complete with a cover notes that make it look the same.

Greeted with decidedly mixed reviews upon its original release, Exile on Main St. has become generally regarded as the Rolling Stones' finest album. Part of the reason why the record was initially greeted with hesitant reviews is that it takes a while to assimilate. A sprawling, weary double album encompassing rock & roll, blues, soul, and country, Exile doesn't try anything new on the surface, but the substance is new. Taking the bleakness that underpinned Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers to an extreme, Exile is a weary record, and not just lyrically. Jagger's vocals are buried in the mix, and the music is a series of dark, dense jams, with Keith Richards and Mick Taylor spinning off incredible riffs and solos. And the songs continue the breakthroughs of their three previous albums.