FILTER REISSUES
Love, actually
Unreconstructed third album rebuilt. By Danny Eccleston.
The Black Crowes
Amorica Deluxe
There was a riot goin’ on: The Black Crowes search for secular transcendence in 1994.
`
★★★★★
UME. CD/LP
IF BLACK CROWES singer Chris Robinson’s risqué choice of album cover had not rung alarm bells (and in fact guaranteed cancelled shelving in key outlets in the US) the image on Amorica’s LP label and CD on-body – a poppy seed pod attached to a barbed hook – surely should have. In 1994, poised to capitalise on the multi-platinum one-two of 1990’s Shake Your Money Maker and 1992’s The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion, the signals were that the Atlanta-bred sextet were heading off-track, somewhere wilder, certainly druggier, with Sly Stone and Santana, Traffic and War joining the Stones and Faces as their lodestars.