Steve Sebastian isn't going mad. Seriously. Granted, musical
comparisons to eccentric influences like Ryan Adams, Tom Petty, and
Elliott Smith abound. But Steve Sebastian is a young college graduate
from Cleveland, Ohio who drives to work, eats home-cooked meals, walks
his dog, attends church, and tries to call his parents every couple of
weeks. Still, he's not strictly typical, either. His music might
best fit into a cozy but lonesome middle ground between the mundane
and the unorthodox, between the old and the new, tradition and
rebellion. It's like the blues as seen in a funhouse mirror, or all
of rock and roll history thrown into a blender and played in reverse,
a twisting kaleidoscope of five decades worth of guitar-based pop
music. Riffs and solos give way to twang and shuffle in a tag-team
match of alt-country haze and classic rock immediacy, accented all the
while by lyrics equally forceful and vulnerable, both visceral and
broken. Rightly enough, his voice actually keeps up with the
shape-shifting act. He growls like Tom Waits, croons like Ryan Adams,
whispers like Thom Yorke, and bellows like The Boss. Equipped
as such, he follows the blues around to just about anywhere it's made
it's home in the past, from the delta to the honky tonk to the arenaand all in between. Yet his vagabond sound is rooted firmly in the bright, not-too-distant future. Call him an observant scholar
of the past or a bold poet of years to come, or maybe just a cool guy
who might as well be your next door neighbor, but it's worth the
trouble to listen to the evidence and decide for yourself.
-Chris Leonard..
..
