Roddy Ricch Feed Tha Streets

1979 was a busy year for Irish guitarist Gary Moore, who after years of seemingly aimless wandering across the musical landscape (including a flirtation with jazz-rock fusion while fronting G-Force) simultaneously re-launched his long-dormant solo career and became a full-time member of Thin Lizzy. Moore had originally agreed to help his old partner in crime Phil Lynott only temporarily, while longtime Lizzy guitarist Brian Robertson recovered from a broken hand incurred in a barroom brawl…

Thirty five years on since their debut album The Angels are still full of pep and Take It to the Streets sounds full of enthusiasm as if it was recorded by some highly inspired newcomers. “To the Streets” opening the album is pure classical hard rock that would appear modern in all times and this may be said about the whole collection…

If early 2006 is remembered for nothing else, it will go down in history for the two greatest urban Americana albums of the 21st century to date – Dion's Bronx in Blue and Willie Nile's Streets of New York, a swaggering braggart of a disc that is to the modern Apple everything that Lou Reed's New York was 15 years before. The opening "Welcome to My Head" sets the stage, raising the curtain on a fantasy vision of the city nightlife that sums up every dream Broadway and beyond have ever instilled in the mind of the outsider, and set to a crunchy guitar melody that is as real as the streets that stretch out from there. It might be Nile's first album in six years, but it sounds as though he's been planning it his entire life – even the songs that slip outside of the city concept ("Asking Annie Out" is the first) share the crowded, bustling air of the more "relevant" rockers, while "The Day I Saw Bo Diddley in Washington Square" paints the scene so firmly that you'll see him, too. Even more impressively, the backing rarely motors in the directions you'd expect. Fiddles keen and a mandolin pounds, while Nile borrowed his band from as far afield as John Mellencamp and Rosanne Cash.