Just when you thought it was safe to go back in to the woods, The Dad Horse Experience hunts you down once more with his new album “I am a Stranger Here Below”. Those of you familiar with his distinctly offbeat, and usually banjo powered, oeuvre will no doubt be pleased about that but it is also of note that The Dad Horse Experience isn’t just giving us more of the same this time around and, in fact, he seems determined to prove that he is more than a one trick pony.
The banjo is still there, of course, but this album highlights the fact that The Dad Horse Experience is out to have a bit of fun these days as he turns from his usual musical fodder – “Down The Mississippi”, for example – towards a series of curiously chosen and affectionate ventures into stranger lands. This may be the result of some sort of madness that has overcome The Dad Horse Experience but it works nonetheless whether it is the gloriously camp old timey styled “My Rough and Rowdy Ways” that is easily capable of making the west swing from a noose or his literal and yet simultaneously oblique take on Barbara Lynn’s soul classic “You’ll Lose A Good Thing”.
Not many albums will leave you with a big smile on your face yet that is exactly what The Dad Horse Experience will do for you with “I Am a Stranger Here Below“.