Some albums make you want to hang yourself, other fill you with light and some, aesthetically speaking, achieve fiddly-squat. The latter are the worst sort and unfortunately, despite a promising cover, Mistico is one of them. Although musically adept - bringing jazz, funk, blues and soul together and proficiently - the album lacks real character. It’s essentially just a recording of an energetic live band riffing, rather than a stand-alone artwork of compositional or thematic vision.
Mistico sure sounds like it was fun to play, and would probably be pretty fun to watch live, but it lacks compositions and thus memorability and too often relies on clichéd blues licks. It’s indelicately produced too, with Hunter’s guitar glossed in a light, fuzzy distortion throughout and the drums lifeless in the mix. While Hunter is an original, sensitive guitarist - previous solo pieces like Fables of Faubus prove that – Mistico is missing something.
And Dear God, enough of this jazz-rock fusion now…
