The Black Crowes - Amorica Deluxe
★★★★★
UME
If Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson’s risqué choice of album cover had not rung alarm bells (and in fact guaranteed cancelled shelving in key outlets in the US) the image on Amorica’s LP label and CD on-body – a poppy seed pod attached to a barbed hook – surely should have. In 1994, poised to capitalise on the multi-platinum one-two of 1990’s Shake Your Money Maker and 1992’s The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion, the signals were that the Atlanta-bred sextet were heading off-track, somewhere wilder, certainly druggier, with Sly Stone and Santana, Traffic and War joining the Stones and Faces as their lodestars.
Unapologetic (sleeve-wise) and augmented by tracks that show its path to fruition, Amorica returns in 2025 having lost none of its extravagant funk, gouched-out balladry or psychedelic lustre. Of its original if remastered songs, cowbell-festooned opener Gone remains ravished: Chris Robinson sings of being “blind, naked and scared”; Marc Ford’s guitar solo is an astral projection. High Head Blues comes on like War’s Spill The Wine. Wiser Time builds to multiple blissful climaxes. And yet individual tracks are almost by the by. Part of what made Amorica a commercial misstep, but good art, was the fact that the songs played like chapters of a single story.
For context, this box set’s compilers have reconstructed, and remixed Tall – the album the band started and scrapped before beginning what became Amorica. Among tracks familiar from 2006 The Lost Crowes compilation, the unreleased Bitter, Bitter You feels too polite to merit a spot on Amorica; Paris Song is a chord-map for the released LP’s exquisite Cursed Diamond. Its best track – as previously revealed on The Lost Crowes– is the slowburning, Wurlitzer-spangled Feathers. Sadly, MOJO could hear no evidence of what drummer Steve Gorman memorably recalled of Tall: “I walked in one day and there was a guy playing French horn. I thought, Jesus Christ! Are we making a Sting record?”
Fresher for Crowes connoisseurs will be seven tracks recorded at Kingsway Studios in New Orleans in October ’92, and four from a radio session recorded at AIR in London in October ’94. For what are basically formalised soundcheck jams, the former score highly for their rich group sound and organic grooves, texturally more akin to Amorica than the Tall cuts. An acoustic version of Nonfiction – a song that would eventually find a pivotal place on Amorica – and Girl From The Pawn Shop, a song they’d drop, are deliciously downbeat, country-blues and soul anointed with Mississippi mud.
By 1994, Marc Ford and others were mired in another sticky substance – black tar heroin. The drug would chase him out of the band and into intensive care, although today he’s alive and clean. On one level it was an absurd cliché – how much of a ’70s blues-rock Xerox did The Black Crowes want to be? Yet on Amorica, it’s hard not to hear and appreciate the search for secular transcendence – its ecstasies and rueful aftermaths – in his every lick.
Amorica Deluxe is out November 14 on UME.
ORDER: Rough Trade
Tracklisting:
LP1-2
AMORICA.
SIDE A
1 GONE (2025 REMASTER)
2 A CONSPIRACY (2025 REMASTER)
3 HIGH HEAD BLUES (2025 REMASTER)
4 CURSED DIAMOND (2025 REMASTER)
SIDE B
1 NONFICTION (2025 REMASTER)
2 SHE GAVE GOOD SUNFLOWER (2025 REMASTER)
3 P. 25 LONDON (2025 REMASTER)
4 BALLAD IN URGENCY (2025 REMASTER)
5 WISER TIME (2025 REMASTER)
SIDE C
1 DOWNTOWN MONEY WASTER (2025 REMASTER)
2 DESCENDING (2025 REMASTER)
SIDE D
1 CHEVROLET
2 SONG OF THE FLESH (2025 MIX)
3 SUNDAY NIGHT BUTTERMILK WALTZ (2025 MIX)
LP3
TALLEST
SIDE A
1 LOWDOWN (2025 MIX)
2 TIED UP AND SWALLOWED (2025 MIX)
3 EVIL EYE (2025 MIX)
4 DIRTY HAIR HALO (2025 MIX)
5 FEATHERS (2025 MIX)
SIDE B
1 THUNDERSTORM 6:54PM (2025 MIX)
2 TITLE SONG (2025 MIX)
3 BITTER, BITTER YOU (2025 MIX)
4 PARIS SONG (2025 MIX) (INSTRUMENTAL)
LP4
MARIE LAVEAU SESSIONS
SIDE A
1 EXIT
2 FEAR YEARS
3 ON THAT HALLOW NIGHT (INSTRUMENTAL)
4 GIRL FROM THE PAWNSHOP
SIDE B
1 BEWILDERED
2 NON-FICTION (ACOUSTIC)
3 THORN'S PROGRESS (INSTRUMENTAL)
LP5 / 10”
LIVE AT AIR STUDIOS, LONDON, UK OCTOBER 25, 1994
SIDE A
A CONSPIRACY (LIVE - LONDON, UK OCTOBER 25, 1994)
2 P.25 LONDON (LIVE - LONDON, UK OCTOBER 245, 1994)
SIDE B
1 WISER TIME (LIVE - LONDON, UK OCTOBER 25, 1994)
2 HIGH HEAD BLUES (LIVE - LONDON, UK OCTOBER 25, 1994)
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