Album Review: CW Stoneking - Gon' Boogaloo

What did you ever want a CW Stoneking record to sound like? Despite being absent from the long-player format for some six years, a point hinted at with this new record’s opening track, How Long, Stoneking sounds like he never left. Gon’ Boogaloo features the same hokum-cum-Delta-influenced swampy blues that made us fall in love with the man in the first place. Rather than throw us into unknown territory, Stoneking eases us from the more familiar grooves of standout single, The Thing I Done, to more abstract and conceptually challenging songs like vocal-bark-driven jam The Jungle Swing. No matter how abstract anything gets though, this is still an album from the man who brought us ‘08’s Jungle Blues, and that same “novelty blues as genuine art” brushstroke coats this album. What could be incorrectly interpreted as being a one trick idea is simply a cipher for the delivery of a plethora of emotions and moods, simply channelled through the tradition of the blues.

Tropes about love and longing litter this album, yes, yet the familiarity of these ideas is simply the surface level pleasure taken from a musician who revels in the pure joy of storytelling. Whether grooving on relaxing, almost dance hall-influenced tunes or losing himself in archetypal blues jams, Stoneking’s commitment to the songwriting art shines through beyond notions of novelty. Despite the general uniformity of tone across the record, the pleasure to be taken from this album is a sign that the blues will never die.