:: John Fogerty - Revival

John Fogerty

John Fogerty’s latest solo album has arrived with much fanfare, with the press lauding it as his best work since his C.C.R days. Matter of fact, if you were to ignore Revival’s modern audio glean, you would have been forgiven if you thought the album was part of CCR’s vintage seventies catalogue. From the title, right down to the album cover art (very similar to Forgety first solo album, 1973’s Blue Ridge Rangers), every thing points to the past. But instead of being a cynical commercial exercise, the John Fogerty in Revival sounds positively revitalised.

Opening track and lead single ‘Don’t You Wish it was True’ is all the pastoral charm and whimsy which Fogerty captures so perfectly through out his career (see CCR’s Proud Mary and Have You Ever Seen the Rain). Everything about this album is soaked in Americana, with its iconic characters (Gunslinger and Broken Down Cowboy), the longing of youth (Summer of Love) and the kind of soothing love that makes bad men turn good (Natural Thing).

Fogerty, who has been a consistent critic of the Iraq war continues to rip into the Bush Administration in ‘Long Dark Night’ and ‘I Can’t Take It No More’ where he snarls accusingly ‘You know you lied about the causalities/You know you lied about the WMD’s/ You know you lied about the detainees/ All over this world’.

But Revival is not similar to Neil Young’s angry anti-Bush album Living with War. Instead, it is close to Young’s Harvest Moon. Just like that minor classic, Fogerty has decided to take a step back and do what comes most naturally to him. The result is an album that will endure.