Seasick Steve: You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

“Spare a bit of change for a cup of tea, guv?”

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Three years after becoming an unlikely poster-boy for hobo pensioner blues, Steven Gene Wold returns to his indie roots on this ragged-trousered album.

Wold’s street-corner style remains as gnarly as ever, despite the odd superstar guest – Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones plays bass on a handful of clattery electric numbers, including the title track. It also makes sense that the US release is going through Jack White’s Third Man label, since Wold’s interplay with drummer Dan Magnusson catches some of the amplified rawness of the White Stripes.

But strip away the romantic, Kerouac-style, Chaplin-esque mythology and his snaggle-toothed busker-blues schtick feels woefully low on bite or originality. The excellent opening and closing tracks, Treasures and It’s a Long Long Way, offer teasing hints of autumnal Johnny Cash or low-voltage Springsteen.

A few more of these gravel-voiced reflections might rebrand Wold from his current agreeably hokey showman to serious songwriter. But maybe he is happy in his metaphorical gutter, acting the post-modern tramp for a complicit media audience.

Stephen Dalton

Stephen Dalton has been writing about all things rock for more than 30 years, starting in the late Eighties at the New Musical Express (RIP) when it was still an annoyingly pompous analogue weekly paper printed on dead trees and sold in actual physical shops. For the last decade or so he has been a regular contributor to Classic Rock magazine. He has also written about music and film for Uncut, Vox, Prog, The Quietus, Electronic Sound, Rolling Stone, The Times, The London Evening Standard, Wallpaper, The Film Verdict, Sight and Sound, The Hollywood Reporter and others, including some even more disreputable publications.