A finely designed business card when it comes to shimmering soul.
Don’t be put off by the fact that Tré Burt releases Oh Boy on the John Prine label: The US songwriter doesn’t sing country songs, even if he sometimes hints at them, for example in the short “Yo Face”. But he does pursue a sound that structurally has a lot in common with the grandmaster’s song. Like Prine, Burt reports from his stomach and from the streets of America, and like Prine, he does so with immediate force and always a little deranged. However, the styles he uses are more soul and blues in a vintage, shimmering 1970s sense. In 2021 he introduced this mix of styles to a larger audience for the first time on his second album YOU, YEAH, YOU, although there was more anger involved at the time.
On TRAFFIC FICTION he condenses this sound again, but at the same time cushions it much more, gives it false bottoms and more sophisticated instrumentation. Finely staged ballads (how beautifully the organ and piano boom in “Piece Of Me”) meet impetuous rockers who sometimes just casually pick up on the balls that the New Wave of Rock’n’Roll brought into play in New York in 2001 , which can be heard in the as cool “Told Ya Then”. The label says: Muscle Shoals meets Beatles, which is certainly not wrong, an addendum is permitted: The ghost of the Wrecking Crew and Jack White were probably also in the room during the sessions.