THE BOY IN THE SAILOR SUIT

Officially credited to Dave Cousins and the Blue Angel Orchestra, the Boy in the Sailor Suit is as faraway as you can get from Cousins' 1972 solo album that featured the epic song "Blue Angel", titled Two Weeks Last Summer. Guitarist Miller Anderson is a hold over from that album but is joined by all new players, including fiddle wunderkind Ian Cutler and that's where this album gets interesting.

Cousins goes all out eclectic on the Boy In The Sailor Suit with a handful of country flavored rock, hard rock and blues songs with even a thirties' era radio pastiche number thrown in. All with varying results. The lead off track "Never Takes Sweats From A Stranger" is a typical Cousins' Strawbs- like tale of caution, helped no doubt by using the riff from the Strawbs' song "Heartbreaker" from 1977's Burning For You album. "Mellow Moon", "The Smile You Left Behind' and "Bringing In The Harvest' are country and folk rock songs that work well with Cutler's fiddle, particularly on the last two, and Anderson's lap steel playing on the first . "Skip To My Lou" and "Hellfire Blues" evoke late sixties' British style folk rockers, Fairport Convention in particular (as noted by Kennethlevine in his own PA review of this album) and features some good tradeoffs between Cutler's fiddle and Anderson's electric lead guitar.

Hard rocking "Mother Luck" is one of the strangest songs on the album with it's near "Foxy Lady" riff and Anderson's Hendrix-like feedback drenched wah-wah lead at the song's coda, while "Lonely Days, Lonely Nights" is another hard rocker devoid of, fortunately, any Hendrix "homage" this time around. Both songs are forgettable as is the soft rocker "Calling Out Your Name". The jazzy thirties' pastiche "Wish You Were Here" is downright grating. So there you have it, an interesting mixed bag of styles with mostly good results beating out the bad.