Pete Sinjin - Better Angels Radio

Better Angels Radio is a helluva car ride... It starts in the West and ends at sunset in the East...And while your taking in all the sights, from virgins praying before votive candles in Highway 5 migrant tents, to redneck kids waxing in poetic reverie to a beautiful damaged river in Pennsylvania, you've got the radio on...and you're flipping the dial... And every damn song is unique...and every damn song is good. Damn good. And different than the one that preceded it. From paeans to the freedom that time behind the wheel affords in the country tinged "Driving California", to the perfectly realized Big Star pop of 'Yer mah Gurl"...from the heartbreaking folk narrative of the last journey of Robert F Kennedy in "Funeral Train", to the defiant stance and roots rock n roll swagger of "Times Like These".... Better Angels Radio spans geography as it spans the years as it spans the immortal radio dial. In short, it's a monumental trip... This lanky curly haired songster comes in the place with one great song after another, a band with veteran performers who obviously are there because of a chemistry. There's Woody Guthrie in there some place, and then maybe Hank Snow, Buck Owens, Dylan, Young and Steve Earle, as much through the music, but more so--kindred even to these culture shifting writers are the stories and the accounts within Pete's songs that harkens less a better day, but appeal to a retrieval of what we've left behind, or are leaving behind. Record stores are bid farewell and kissed goodbye with the regret that '..you can't down-load no soul...' lonesome highways are driven through 'California', blond wives are admired in snowfalls and it's all moving along through a poetic landscape... Pete delivers a paean to Robert Kennedy that yanks oldsters into another decade and the rest of us finding ourselves witnessing something we know we should respect. And 'Times Like These'... guaranteed to have any trucker stomping his boot, setting any girls' imagination to what a guy with that much fight, and that defiant attitude complete with admission of being 'down on my knees' who gets up again and can laugh about it--must be like. ----E. Burnett.

1) Driving California
2) Broken Radios
3) Yer Mah Gurl
4) Funeral Train
5) Romance of the Punkers
6) Snowflakes in Your Summer Hair
7) All That Remains
8) All the Record Stores
9) Wasted in the Sun
10) Brand New Year
11) Times Like These
12) Schuylkill Red