In one of those rare moment of philosophical thought, I came to the conclusion that when I die I shall – undoubtedly - go to Heaven yet I can guarantee that I’ll still be able to hear Dave Arcari playing a gig in Hell from all the way up in the clouds. Featuring his ever faithful National Resophonic guitar and the kind of howling, growling voice that can only be directly connected to a man’s soul, Dave Arcari returns to his muscular, raucous blues roots with “Devil’s Left Hand”.
If you are a Michael Bublé chicken in a basket kind of guy then finding yourself at the Arcari raw meat fest will be a bit of a shock to the system. Songs familiar to anyone who has heard an urban blues band (“Trouble In Mind” and “Can’t Be Satisfied”, for example) get stripped out and taken back to their gestation and yet, never one to limit himself to the conventional, Dave Arcari then takes the words of Rabbie Burns and weaves them seamlessly into a country blues yarn called “MacPherson’s Lament”. That’s the mark of quality as it is no small task to take someone else’s words and make them sound like they were your own.
The blues, as a musical form, hasn’t developed much in recent years and there are also no shortages in the supply of one man and a slide guitar practitioners doing the twelve bar rounds these days. So what makes Dave Arcari different? I’ve thought about this for a while now and have come to the conclusion that he is more like Billy Childish than Big Bill Broonzy. No one in Scotland today could possibly know what it was like to be a sharecropper in the deep South and therefore would find it difficult to understand the roots of the blues but, and here is where the Billy Childish comparison comes in, Dave Arcari instead takes a parallel course and places the past right alongside the present in his chosen musical genre. Authenticity without plagiarism if you like.
For a man who has been around a bit, Dave Arcari, and this album for that matter, has a notable lack of pretension as what you hear is what you will see – experience might be a better word – if you see him perform. He plays the blues but he’s never too reverential and he’s not afraid of a bit of self parody either. The Devil might have taught him to play but it is that good natured feel that proves God is on Dave Arcari’s mailing list too.