Getting There

by

The Bacon Brothers

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This is an excellent CD and definitely worth a listen. I was very pleasantly surprised at how good they truly are. Very tight harmonies, upbeat, enjoyable music! Think really good folksy garage band. My personal favorite song is "Ten Years in Mexico" then, "Don't Look Back", followed by "Jersey Girl", "Angelina" and "Getting There". "T.M.I." and "Arm Wrestling Woman" are happy catchy songs that got stuck in your head and you really don't mind that they are stuck there! Kevin Bacon is more than just a pretty faced, talented actor - he can sing and so can his brother! The Bacon Brothers really do ROCK!!! Check them out!!!

The sophomore release from the Bacon Brothers shows them stretching their wings and trying more with their basic folky/roots rock sound, and while some of the experimentation sinks them, more often it's improving the songs.

Best outings for Kevin are usually quiet understated ballads (his elegiac "Ten Years in Mexico", the achingly beautiful "When You Decide You've Stayed too Long"), with "Arm Wrestling Woman" the lone exception where he manages to come off sounding tough instead of phony on a rockier number.

Michael's best are "It's a Rocky Road" (sounding not unlike James Taylor's "Copperline") and his empty nest lament in "Don't Lose the Boy". The duo also manage a surprisingly good rendition of Tom Waits' "Jersey Girl", complete with great vocal interplay and some nice falsetto from Kevin.

Low points for the disc are "T.M.I" which runs too long and in too many directions (rapid tempo changes, awkward verses at times, a strange choir part singing "T....M....I"). "Not Born to Beauty" is an ambitious bar band tribute that suffers from too busy an arrangement and a vocal from Kevin that descends into parody by trying way too hard to sound "soulful".

Several other songs are solid without being exceptional. (The arrangement weighs down "Chop Wood" a bit, "Angelina" has Kevin's best vocal work but just isn't as good a lyric as some of the others).

Bottom Line: These guys are still quite a bit better than the amount of recognition they get would indicate. Don't let the fact that one of the band members is a grade B movie star keep you from giving them a chance.

3 1/2 stars