Django Mack - ‘Round Christmas
Performers like Django Mack promise to
be among the rare performers tackling traditional popular music who may be
capable of bringing something lasting to the genre while remaining faithful to
its formulas. The only route to making this happen is through lyrics but,
predominantly, the charisma of the songwriter/performer. Mack sings with sound
and character that blues fans will certainly embrace, but it isn’t merely some
overly dramatic bucket of blood nonsense despite the dirt and gravel in his
voice. The two latest releases from Mack, the single “’Round Christmas” and its
bonus track “Big Black Dog”, finds him fixed in on the goal of embodying the
characters behind each song and doing a bravura job of it. This is exactly the
sort of artists that this style of music needs to continue getting heard in our
increasingly narrow world.
His voice is, arguably, the most
memorable quality of “’Round Christmas”. Mack’s speaker is a character locked
in primal doubt, stripped of all comfort, and afraid to confront the future and
his vocal spares no expense in getting us to believe that. It’s this sort of
commitment that makes him special. The band turns in a stellar performance with
a patient backbeat that brings the song to its peaks with great care while
sparkling and often echo-laden guitar thickens the mood. This isn’t a
light-hearted tribute to the season. Django Mack wanted to write a song
exploring the theme in a different way and really hits it out of the park with
the musical and vocal content.
The words are, likewise, quite
memorable. There are a handful of surprising rhymes placed in the song that are
really quite bracing and natural. Any lyricist who can write an intelligent,
lucid text that doesn’t seem like a bunch of individual lines sewn together
deserves notice, but his skills are a step above that.
“Big Black Dog” pops and rolls with
woozy and bluesy rambunctiousness. Django Mack commands this track with every
ounce of the authority he brought to bear on “’Round Christmas”, but he
manifests it in a different way. Instead of playing up the comedic aspects of
the lyric, Mack’s delivery is steady but low-key and never overemphasizes the
song’s sad sack humor. The piano really drives things hard and takes off even
faster with its brief instrumental breaks. The lyric is much simpler than its
counterpart on the single, but there’s still the same guiding intelligence that
saves this from sounding like a rote rework.
Django Mack’s music will, undoubtedly,
continue gaining a wider and wider audience. Tracks like “’Round Christmas” and
its companion track will guarantee that. He has style to burn, but there’s
genuine musical and lyrical substance between his compelling turns on each of
these tracks. It’s equally for sure that he hasn’t even come close to his peak
and will continue growing from here into, potentially, one of the
transformative figures that the genre has needed for a number of years.
Scott Wigley
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