Little Feat - Strike Up The Band
(Hot Tomato Records, 2025)
My long-time colleague at All About Jazz, Doug Collette, recently reviewed Little Feat’s new recording, Strike Up The Band at Glide Magazine. In his review, Collette opines,
“It’s absolutely uncanny to listen to this latest Little Feat album and notice how the stylistic similarities of Strike Up The Band evoke the vintage releases of their namesake lineups from the mid-to-late Seventies.”
I couldn’t agree more. Strike Up The Band contains more music characterizing the original sextet than anything the band managed in the late 1980s through 2010. By now, founder Lowell George is more of a memory brightened by lightning flash than a impending presence, his spirit present like a fleeting fragrance. This new recording owes more to the 45-year residency of guitarist Paul Barrere and his uniquely superb slide guitar playing and jaunty, funk-laden composing, both of which guitarist Scott Scharrard has studied closely.
Sharrard, former musical director for Gregg Allman, now a permanent member of the band along with drummer Tony Leone (who replaced Gabe Ford, who stood in for the late Richie Hayward) and his close study of the band is most responsible for the contemporary sound. Sharrard sings lead vocals on the opening “4 Days Of Heaven, 3 Days Of Work” supplying the stinging slide guitar that draws equally from George and Barrere (leaning more to George). The song begins deceptively before adopting that patented Little Feat ragged groove. Leone has carefully studied Richie Hayward’s infectious strut and adds it here.
Sharrard also contributes to “Shipwrecks” which recalls Bill Payne’s “When All Boats Rise.” It is a more gentle ballad than a candid Feat shuffle. The first single from the album, “You’re Too High To Cut My Hair” is the perfect eutection of Tower of Power, circa Bump City (Warner Bros, 1972) and Feat’s Dixie Chicken (Warner Bros, 1973). Rebecca and Megan Lovell (Larkin Poe) join the band on the “We Are The World Flavored” title composition, while Molly Tuttle, Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams sing background on the curiously south-of-the-border flavored “Bluegrass Pines.” These are not the only notable collaborations. The noted Grateful Dead collaborator, Robert Hunter, joined Bill Payne in writing “Bluegrass Pines” and Blackberry Smoke’s leader, Charlie Starr, provided Payne help on “Bayou Mama.”
Strike Up The Band is the first Little Feat album with all new material since 2012’s Rooster Rag (Hot Potato). It has denser sonics, presenting a wall-of-sound as compared to the more delicate filigree making up the earlier album. “When Hearts Fall” and “Disappearing Ink” fall somewhat outside of the LF paradigm, but keeping enough of the germ element to qualify as a stylistic evolution. This is a significant recording by a different band originally plowing new ground in the 1970s. But significant it is and we are better for it.