Description
When a musical artist hits his stride and produces one meaty release after another, attention must be paid. Case in point: Chuck McCabe. Building on the momentum of his fiendishly listenable 2004 release, Chicken Dinners and 2002 s equally tasty Bad Gravity Day, the northern California-based singer-songwriter s Sweet Reunion is the richest, most ambitious album of his career. Sweet Reunion attests to the full creative maturity of its maker and indeed the vitality of the album as a musical format. Download a choice cut or two, but you ll want the CD, not least for its elegant design, but mainly to hear a contemporary artist at the top of his game. -Tim Peters, Musicdish
McCabe borrows just enough from his Irish-Scottish roots to inspire his own style. The results are an exuberant and very American synthesis. But no matter where McCabe comes from, he's an American boy, and Sweet Reunion has the rhythm and blues to prove it, and plenty of wild country to prove it in. "Grandpa Played Softball" and "That's What I Like About My Baby" show off McCabe's flair for celebrating the everyday, along with some surprisingly elegant rhyme schemes and outright great guitar work. "Gone to Utah" paints the vibrant colors and wide open spaces of the American Southwest in strokes of steel strings and the lingering touch of suspended chords. "Deliver Us from Evil" and "No Good to Me Now" borrow from the distant but related realms of blues and gospel, one a thunder-heavy prayer on the wickedness of life, the other a joyful, horn-backed celebration of personal growth. "Sweet Reunion" is the perfect ending to an album full of separations and brief alliances, a powerfully hopeful promise of better eternities. -Sara Meador, Rambles.net
Sweet Reunion is my favorite, of McCabe s albums. It is visually the richest, and includes a fine picture of the singer as a youth, amidst the family that helped form him. The Point is clear: we need to go back and look again at what made us what we are - the past has given us things worth keeping. -Mike Simpson, TrueWind Music
1. The Minstrel Boy
2. Grandpa Played Softball
3. Gone to Utah
4. The Junk in Murphy's Yard
5. Deliver Us From Evil
6. Reunion Hymn
7. Erin the Fair (And Caledonia the Brave)
8. Bonifay Rag
9. Deliver Us (Reprise)
10. Old Enemy
11. That's What I Like About My Baby
12. No Good to Me Now
13. Sweet Reunion
14. Reunion (Reprise)