The fine folks with even finer taste published a great review of George's great record. We''ll include it here, but I tell you what, it's a lot better in person. Go buy Elmore.
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In the 1960s, marketing departments created categories to help navigate the vast terrain of popular music, segmenting music into various genres based on stylistic elements. Somewhere down the line, these categories became burdensome, inescapable labels. But as musicologists Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman noted, there exits "a big difference between the categories used to sell music and actual patterns of musical influence and exchange."
The staff at Make or Break Records jokes that George Lewis Jr.'s music is "soul-thrash." While this doesn't tell the whole story, only a mash-up of genres could explain his art. R&B-punk, blues-metal or gospel-hard rock could be thrown into his bag of tricks, but all this silly wordplay leads to the same dead end. Lewis transcends the simple one-word answers we've used before, and I'm not about to coin a new one. As for George's take on my dilemma: "Labeling is your language, it's not mine… I almost like the fact that this template exists because then it forces creative people on your end to go above and beyond as far as writing about a record." I guess I have my work cut out for me.
While Lewis seems content with calling his captivating EP Hold Me a rock record, he does recognize that his music covers a lot of ground: "Sometimes I worry about it, like, 'What am I doing, I need to focus.'" Lewis' music doesn't lack focus; rather it encompasses a large musical territory. The influences George credits with inspiring Hold Me include John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, soul singers Otis Redding and Sam Cooke, late Dylan, Nina Simone and the Beach Boys. Not the most contemporary stuff, but as Lewis explained, "It was weird, but going backwards was starting to become fresh again…to me it was getting back to basics."
George's album takes off with the appropriately titled "Take Off" and fools the listener with a guitar intro reminiscent of "Tennessee Jed." Then Lewis' lush vocal tones usher us into a slower tempo than anticipated, and the song begins a two-minute ascent to a high-energy climax, after which the bottom drops out from under us and we're back where we started. The entire EP follows suit, setting up expectations and then defying them t every turn. Songs build slowly, rising and falling in waves, with splashes of searing guitar and sudden hurricanes of sound that, to this fan's ears, equal pure sonic nirvana.