Looking for Ground

CD Cover Wyckham Porteous
Bohemia Beat / Ragged Pup

Review by Gary 'pigboy' Swartz



40-second excerpt from "3 a.m." (313 Kb .au file)


"Wet Coast" singer/songwriter, author, playwright Wyckham Porteous, U.S. producer Jimmy LaFave, Denver label Bohemia Beat Records and the various musicians who contributed guitars, bass, B-3, piano, mandolin, fiddle, harmonica and backing vocals clearly found common ground while creating Looking for Ground. This is a work of collective strengths that deserves to be heard.

The material is borderless, though not to say unfocused, and defies a convenient pigeon hole. Folk, country, rock, whatever works. The album was released, and appreciated, in Europe long before finally coming home, perhaps because Porteous doesn't shy away from sounding intelligent, adult, even radio indifferent. Try true to his vision.

While his lyrics are opaque at times, as in "Back on That Train," they don't discomfit. On songs like "3 a.m." you don't have to have been there -- in love, on the phone and separated by distance and time zones -- to be there. Plus it's all delivered by a voice that hasn't been sliced, diced or cloned from the same loaf as so many others.


Artist Contact Info: Ragged Pup Records, P.O. Box 36050, 1153 Esquimalt Rd., Victoria, B.C., Canada, V9A 3N7, (604) 920-4855




First published in Drop-D Magazine on October 24, 1996

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