Alabama 3 - Outlaw Early Review

“There’s a train a-coming…”

It looks like things are ramping up for the imminent release of the new Alabama 3 (”A3″ in the US) album, “Outlaw”.  An early review is available here…

“The latest offering is simply called “Outlaw”. Once again it features wit as sharp as a needle. Once again it’s built around a melange of country, bluegrass, the blues and home-grown techno. However, where previous outings occasionally found the disparate elements engaged in a stylistic tug of war, this set sounds completely natural. No longer a case of welding together opposites in a perverse game of Push The Parameters, but simply an exercise in common ground. These are sounds that emerged from the (under)ground up. Decades apart perhaps, but from the same unifying tortured soul. The songs of life’s outsiders. The sounds of history’s outlaws.

And it’s a great record. Far more extravert than either “La Peste” and “Power in the Blood”, more pure than “Exile on Coldharbour Lane”, “Outlaw” finds the band jumping the trains of sepia tinted American mythology and drawing a direct line to the all too often unsung outlaws of British history…

…an album that draws on the unifying experience of the outsider fuses cultures and revels in the resulting confusion. It’s an album about survival in a crazy world, a record that is rich in its own humanity (like all great story tellers Rob ["Larry Love"] brings to life the real emotions at the core of the moody, dangerous ghetto - a fact that goes way beyond bling bling culture). Above all however “Outlaw” is the album that Alabama 3 have threatened to make since day one. “

Via FreeA3

Want a taste of Alabama 3?  You can find several excellent free MP3s (including an early version of “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”, apparently to be the first single from the album) here.

(Courtesy of Captain Paranoid, who also has some tasty MP3s on that same page)