The Hustler
The latest Jeff Klein album "The Hustler" album is available direct from us here and for download from Tune Tribe now: www.tunetribe.com
Peter Buck of R.E.M selected "Put You To Sleep" from it for his personal selection covermount on the August edition of Uncut magazine, which selected it as Americana "Album of the Month" in July.
Tune Tribe threw a lovely launch party last week and were kind enough to ask us. As we liked the way they expressed their feelings for Jeff we thought we'd present them here for y'all:
TuneTribe brings you an exclusive taste of ‘The Hustler’, the third album from one of Austin, Texas’ most notable exponents of fine Americana: Jeff Klein.
Jeff Klein reclines
The theme at the heart of ‘The Hustler’ is love, albeit a love which is by turns either lost, fading or wholeheartedly unrequited. Recorded in New Orleans it was produced by Afghan Whigs/Twilight Singers frontman Greg Dulli and Blind Melon’s Mike Napolitano. It’s a record brimming with a melancholic Americana sound; a backdrop for Klein’s desolate, confessional and affecting lyrics.
Nowhere is this despondency more evident than on ‘Ironside’, where Klein’s warm, husky tones ponderously merge with the voice of an exotic dancer he met in a New Orleans bar to sing the plaintive chorus “so we drink till we get sick/because anything feels better than being this paralysed”.
The pleading resignation of ‘All I Want’, with its tumbling acoustic guitar and distant, barely audible, trumpet, offers further proof that Klein’s is a world where relations between lovers are characterised by conflict and separation, and key emotions and desires go unexpressed until it’s too late.
Elsewhere, the programmed drums which provide a bed to ‘Put You To Sleep’ – Klein’s tale of a jaded lover who has become bored of him – and the upbeat Southern rock-tinged ‘Suzanne’ – a bitter diatribe against a former belle – demonstrate that Klein’s musical pallet extends beyond the downbeat.
It’s rarely easy listening, but it’s soulful, intimate and ultimately rewarding. Go and hear for yourself.
