Back Again....Naturally

Use Me- Esther Phillips MP3

10/1/11

http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/3818/58688

Southern Tier Farmer's Tan Pale Lager- Superior Market, Sunnyside, Queens, NY- 22 oz. bomber into 10 oz. Brandy Snifter- 9.0% ABV

Head- About a a half finger of ligh head, which receded almost immediately after the pour

Color- Between light orange, straw colored

Mouthfeel- Medium to medium heavy mouth feel. Moderate carbonation.

Aroma- Kind of boozy...not much else in there for me. Maybe I'm out of practice.

Taste/ Overall- In my opinion this tastes like a boozy IPA rather than a Pale Lager. Beeradvocate.com describes this an Imperial Pilsner but that is not what the bottle indicates. I am not to happy with this beer, basically because it doesn't taste like what it is advertised to be. Would not get this again which is unfortunate because I do enjoy Southern Tier beers a lot, but this one didn't deliver.

On the turntable is Alone Again, Naturally- Esther Phillips- Recorded for Kudu/ CTI in 1972. After another long break due to two destination bachelor parties over the last two weekends I am finally doing a post. Now I hope to have an uninterrupted string of reviews to share. I certainly have been listening to a lot of music between revisiting old records and working my way through my summer purchases which I hope to be caught up on by the end of October when the WFMU Record Fair happens! I have been trying to make a mixtape/cd of stuff I have been listening to recently and I have been having some trouble finding a coherent theme. I haven’t made a mixtape/cd in quite some time and basically I wanted to compile some things from LP’s I have been listening to over the last 2-3 months. Mainly these LP’s are of the jazz/funk/fusion variety but I added a vocal track from this LP along with a Roberta Flack track, on an otherwise instrumental mix, which seemed to fit in with the sensibility of some of the other tracks.

I am not going to get into Ms. Phillips life to much here but overall she was an underdog often caught in the shadow of Aretha Franklin’s mainstream success. These two artists were considered contemporaries, whose careers followed similar arches but Ms. Phillips was actually a few years older than Ms. Franklin. Additionally Ms. Phillips life was affected early on by both alcohol/drug abuse and whose music seems to have jazzier leanings in my opinion. This LP was tucked away in a $2 bin. I picked it up because I had heard her name before and records on the Kudu/CTI Level from this time period are a pretty safe bet especially for $2. I am often perplexed by how retailers determine the price of their used records. Obviously scarcity, demand and condition all play a role in this decision but it seems unfair that a record this good gets relegated to cheapo bin, but, the stores loss is my gain.


This is a good record with some solid tunes and tight, polished arrangements preformed by a collection of session musicians anyone would be happy to include on their recordings. I was unfamiliar with Ms. Phillips work before I bought this LP. Phillips has a highly personalized approach to her vocals and it seems that a modern day artist like Macy Gray may have taken more than a few cues from Phillips phrasing. I have included an MP3 of Use Me, the lead off track of Side A, which has a particularly well crafted groove stripped of any overproduction some Kudu/CTI productions had.