Search - Archer Prewitt :: White Sky

And he can draw!

George T. Parsons | Nevada City, CA | 05/14/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"It took me about three listens to "get" this one, his last one grabbed me from the get-go, but this is a different deal. More stark, but more soulful too. A continued distillation of the themes Archer has pursued from the Coctails days till today. Where his debut album had a heady slightly euphoric 60's flavor, this moves into the more confusing terrain of the 70's. Archer struts his guitar-god status on Motorcycles, almost all of the songs have seasonal references; Summer's End, Final Season, Last Summer Days, and the themes of time passing are explored throughout. Shake is like Folk Implosion meets Burt Bacharach writing a song for, say, the Chi-Lites. And it works in a warm pre-discodelic soul-poppin' kinda way. While on tracks like I'll Be Waiting and Last Summer Days the spirit of Nick Drake is invoked. The eight minute Walking on the Farm is reminicent of Neil Young in his lost lonely endless rural highway way, but articulated like Richard Davies or Eric Matthews into some wailing noir moment of epiphany."

Archer Does it Again!

George T. Parsons | 10/17/1999

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Ever since my all-time favorite group the Coctails went their seperate ways some years ago, I've been following the old members individual efforts. Archer- who served as more or less the frontman for the Coctails continues to display his individual skills as a performer and songwriter. The sounds that are produced in this album as well as his previous solo effort are very mature and contain excellently structured arrangements. It's perfect music to lay in bed thinking to or for walking down the street. While long gone is goofyiness that I love in the older Coctail recordings a very unique and elegant sound is the replacement. The music created by Archer and his friends in their many different groups over the years all deserve a listen to such as the Sea and Cake. There's a spark in the variety of music I can't begin to describe."

A great white sky indeed...

boeanthropist | Cambridge, MA | 02/18/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"...full of light and warmth and space and the sort of blues which are not the blues per se, not of the hellhound-on-my-trail sort anyway, more like what Motown and Stax did with the blues... It's a lazy, Sunday sort of record, near to those Sundays when you don't have a lover and you're not particularly feeling the lack of one and you're not particularly hungover, if at all, and it's Sunday anyway, lost in the big city you're not quite ready to call home yet, so what do you do? You go for a walk, a la Robert Walser, and the walk proceeds something like Robert Walser narrating one of his own Sunday walks, the world streams by you, the cars and the basketball courts and the hanging laundry and the impeccable old ladies coming home from church with their starched grandchildren... that's what this feels like to me. No histrionics. No ambiguous but overwhelming pain looking hither-thither for a cause or an oppressor. Just life inside the head, and the head with its two eyes, and the eyes seeing what they see and moving on down the street in a funky, unhurried, mildly introspective groove that is exactly what it is. In that sense, it's a perfectly logical extension of Prewitt's songs in the latterday Coctails -- even when it gets serious, it never gets all that serious. It never gets serious with a hidden agenda. It just moves on down the easily naviagted, slightly seedy streets of it's own spring Sunday... Mature, I'd say: not cliche-wise, but mature in terms of the vantagepoint from which the songs come. Which is a fine, rich surprise in light of all the 1970s-ish arrangements -- if only the 70s themselves could have had such subtle objectivity."