JJ Grey hails from a place in Florida populated with meth cooks, ex-cons, fugitives, and hardworking blue-collar folks trying to find grace within it all. The songs on this 2007 album rise from that place. They’re upheld on sturdy blasts of Stax-y R&B-soul-funk and bare-boned swamp rock. At times Grey has a Southern novelist’s eye for languid existences (the hard-life claustrophobia on “Turpentine” is inescapable), and he always shows great taste in music. He nods to Link Wray (“Footsteps”), Sly Stone (“War”), Otis Redding (“A Woman”), and Tony Joe White (“Mississippi”). And he’s all Van Zandt (Ronnie and Townes) on “On Palastine.”

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