Damn
The Roses
Green Records
By Scott Roberts
Proverbially speaking, a book cannot be judged by its cover. The same cannot be said as often or as confidently about judging a CD by its cover. If you see a guy with a tight t-shirt and a cowboy hat on a cover, or four guys with perfectly coiffed hair wearing black leather, you can pretty much guess what the music on the inside is going to sound like. If, however, you were to deduce that Craig Jackson’s latest CD, Damn The Roses, would have the laid-back acoustic, hippie vibe of The Grateful Dead’s American Beauty based on the fact that the CD’s cover is nearly an exact replica of that album, you’d be “dead” wrong (and possibly “grateful” too, depending on how you feel about those ancient rockers) to find that instead the music within is a melodically-rich, smoothly produced group of songs reminiscent of a country-tinged Jackson Browne or perhaps a slightly cheerier Freedy Johnston.
“Keep it simple/Simple is good,” Jackson
Damn The Roses is a
well-produced, nicely written and performed group of songs, but with a few
rough edges and an occasional production enhancement from this century, the
Nashville-based Craig Jackson could easily become a national force and create
an Americana