CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE
SUGAR BLUE: Cross Roads” (Free Bird Import):: You may remember his harmonica from “Miss You” (or if you’re lucky Johnny Shines’s newly tape-available Too Wet To Plow), but if you figured he could sing at all you didn’t guess his voice would be as rich and mellifluous as his harp, more King Pleasure than Little Walter.
CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE
Robert Christgau
by
SUGAR BLUE: Cross Roads” (Free Bird Import):: You may remember his harmonica from “Miss You” (or if you’re lucky Johnny Shines’s newly tape-available Too Wet To Plow), but if you figured he could sing at all you didn’t guess his voice would be as rich and mellifluous as his harp, more King Pleasure than Little Walter. Nor would you have predicted an existential blues in the style of Mark-Almond, nor a fanfare that worked. Never fear, though— he comes in on one Sonny Boy Williamson cover and goes out on another, and he earns them both. A*
DEPECHE MODE: Speak And Spell” (Sire):: “New Life” is worthy of Eno at his most rhapsodically technopastoral, but most of this tuneful pop croses Meco (without the humble functionalism), Gary Numan (without the devotion to surface), and Kraftwerk (without the humor—oh, definitely without the humor). You’d think after 75 years people would have seen through the futurist fallacy—an infatuation with machinery is the ultimate one-sided love affair. But then, this isn’t futurism—they call it pop. C-