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Sam Bush
Laps in Seven
(Sugar Hill)
First Appeared in The Music Box, June 2006, Volume 13, #6
Written by John Metzger
On his latest solo effort Laps in Seven, Sam Bush continues to refine
all of the genre-busting moves that he has made since founding the revolutionary
New Grass Revival in 1972. Just within the span of the album’s opening trio of
tunes, he and Emmylou Harris reconnect for an impassioned duet amidst the
driving rock of The River’s Gonna Run; he steams through the spry
bluegrass of Bringing in the Georgia Mail; and he settles into the
ethereal beauty of the instrumental The Dolphin Dance. Elsewhere, he
places his own country-imbued spin upon Robbie Fulks’ Where There’s a Road,
and he effortlessly navigates through the non-traditional time signatures that
anchor both the energetic title track as well as a cover of John Hartford’s On the Road.
Throughout Laps in Seven, Bush and his stellar backing band — which
includes bass player Byron House, guitarist Keith Sewell, and banjoist Scott
Vestal, along with guest appearances by Buddy Miller, Tim O’Brien, Jean Luc
Ponty, and Little Feat’s Shaun Murphy — deliver a lively mixture of intricate
instrumental and harmonic textures that culminate with the melancholy refrains
of David and Linda LaFlamme’s White Bird. To his credit, Bush
successfully avoided becoming mired within the radio-friendly fare that tempered
the finer moments on his 2004 endeavor King of My World, but his
scattershot approach is equally problematic in that there’s nothing to bind
together cohesively his otherwise superb material. Like many of Bush’s outings,
Laps in Seven contains numerous individual passages that are richly
rewarding, but its contents are so erratically jumbled that the album ultimately
feels like an incomplete thought.  ½
Laps in Seven is available from Amazon.com.
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2006 The Music Box
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