Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
One listen to Bottle Cap Sky is all it takes to understand why Michael Ubaldini is called The Jack Kerouac of Americana. Even half way through the first track, Walk Through Fire, really is enough to wallow in the ensuing imagery and words that glide that through the air and smack you as if hit by the aftermath of water from someone dive bombing into a swimming pool.
Michael and The Lonesome Playboys takes the idea of country and moves it up several notches, retro but with a new wonderful feel that whilst paying a slight homage to the country of old reminds the genre that time has finally moved on and it is now a different era, a period in which should be explored with great appreciation.
The trouble was, with a couple of notable exceptions such as the late, great Johnny Cash, some of the stars of the past seemed to sing the song without ever really either meaning it or knowingly never have…well walked the line as Johnny Cash would have said. Michael Ubaldini certainly has lived a life that would make boys-own adventure books dismiss it as too big a story to give credence to. This man and his music has authenticity, a belief in what he saying to you is not just some nod towards supposed adventure but having really lived.
Bottle Cap Sky relishes in this, it lives alongside Michael Ubaldini and breathes the same fumes and appreciates the same vapours that the man delivering the lyrics does, a rare combination in which the listener takes further gratification in. Aside from the very cool opener, tracks such as Sweet Ole’ Riddle, the haunting Lonesome When Your Gone, the fantastic The Outlaw Kind with its youthful dreams of desire and the thought of a young lad making his way across country and the electric J.W. Price of Oil Texas all read as if indeed written by Kerouac or one of the great American post war poets.
When you have done so much in life, it becomes a pleasure to write the words for others to take an interest in the tales you sing, in Michael Ubaldini those tales could entrance even the most uninterested of listeners.
Bottle Cap Sky is a great return for male American Story-telling.
Bottle Cap Sky is released on July 8th on Black Water Records.
Ian D. Hall