R.L. Burnside: Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down

North Mississippi bluesman R.L. Burnside has had one of the most welcome and unexpected third-act careers in recent years. After laboring in obscurity, Burnside found a wider audience thanks to the 1991 film Deep Blues, in which director Robert Mugge and journalist Robert Palmer went looking for unadulterated blues music. They found Burnside, and, thanks to their film, so did many others. Notions of purity may have initially attracted listeners, but other projects, which Burnside has alternated with more straightforward blues records, have kept the attention focused on him. Even blues purists would have a tough time denying the appeal of the Jon Spencer collaboration A Ass Pocket Of Whisky or the surprisingly effective, Tom Rothrock-dominated remix experiment Come On In. The new Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down, on the other hand, makes a pretty good case for blues purism. The fact that Burnside doesn't play guitar provides the first bad omen, and the busy, style-jumping production does the rest. "My Eyes Keep Me In Trouble," for example, drowns Burnside's vocals in a sea of mandolins, while elsewhere, samples, scratches, and loops prove far less interesting than on Come On In. There's a decent Burnside album buried here, with spare songs like the title track providing the strongest moments. The spoken-word, album-closing "R.L.'s Story," an autobiographical tale filled with murders and mishaps set to a spooky arrangement, may be another overly dramatic example of the way blues fans turn their idols into myths, but it also serves as a reminder that Burnside has lived the blues. If Wish falls short of his best work or his intense live shows, that experience goes a long way toward excusing a creative misstep.