Alex Lopez – Yours Truly, Me…
Yours Truly, Me…, the sensational new album from bluesman Alex Lopez, rocks and rolls with a heartfelt swing in “Take Me Back Home (Redux),” offers a warm embrace in the midst of total darkness in “Chase My Blues Away,” and a relatable devil of a dirge in the restless “Sinful.”
It gallops with a rhythmic ease in “I Can’t Stop (Redux),” takes a Slowhand-style approach to balladic blues-rock in “I Love You Blues (Redux)” and the piano-focused “I Will Miss You.” Lopez layers of melodic grooving in “I’m a Losing It (Redux),” “Woe Is Me” and the vibrant bar-brawlers “Tush,” “Cheating Blues” and my personal favorite, “I’m a Working Man.”
Whether he’s getting sensitive in “All I Really Want Is You” or rolling like a carefree vagabond in any of the other eleven tracks that this righteous record is sporting, Alex Lopez establishes himself as a modern day master of the blues here. While it runs a mere 44-minutes in total length, Yours Truly, Me… is one of the few LPs that I would deem both cinematic and imaginatively engaging around every one of its many turns.
There’s a textural expressiveness to songs like “Sinful” and “I Can’t Stop (Redux)” that you just can’t find in a lot of the mainstream pop albums that have been pulling in the big buzz from both coasts over the last year.
Lopez artfully weaves different instrumental components together in “Chase My Blues Away,” “I Will Miss You” and “I Love You Blues (Redux),” and despite the fact that every one of these compositions is an individual beast in its own right, there’s a sense of continuity to the music that makes everything feel progressively tied together, as though we were reading from different passages in an intimate diary of love, lust, loss and luminosity.
I don’t often say this about blues records, but Yours Truly, Me… feels almost operatic in its storytelling-centric aesthetic, and I think that it’s outside of the box-style construction is definitely what makes it the perfect blues LP to kick off the ensuing autumn.
I’ve been listening to a lot of really good music this year, but of all the records in this genre, Alex Lopez’s latest is definitely in a class of its own. Every time that we think we’ve heard the best of his brilliance in action, like the chest-beating “I Can’t Stop (Redux)” for example, he turns around and finds a way to top himself, like in the climactic ending number “Cheating Blues (Redux),” which isn’t something that can be said for the vast majority of artists he’s competing with for the spotlight at the moment.
Lopez is an ace at making unselfish, easy-going blues records with a soulful, independent-minded lyrical center, and if you’ve never heard his music before now, I would say that this LP is a good way of getting acquainted with his sound. It’s certainly one of the more complete efforts I’ve heard from an underground performer recently, and a strong contender for the best indie blues album of the year if his scene fails to match its high caliber of content.
If you enjoyed a preview from Alex Lopez’s Yours Truly, Me… check out his official website by clicking here. Give him a like on Facebook by clicking here & a follow on Twitter by clicking here.
