MP3 Jake La Botz - Sing This To Yourself
The rawest, saddest, acoustic album ever made. Music to kill or be killed to.
11 MP3 Songs in this album (45:25) !
Related styles: BLUES: Folk-Blues, ROCK: American Underground
Details:
11 Sordid Tales of Human Misery and Redemption.
"JAKE LA BOTZ, Sing This to Yourself…and Other Songs for a Personal Apocalypse (Charnel Ground)
Heartache transforms into profound albeit bleak wisdom on this acoustic outing by bluesman/actor La Botz. From the abyss, he delivers stunners like “Depression Brings Me Flowers,” “Hard to Love What You Kill” and “About Who I Am,” which rank among the hardest-hitting, most poetic and melodic songs he’s written. “Sky is Wide Open” ultimately suggests gentle hope: “Clouds take your sorrow when you give up tomorrow/ And yesterday keeps singing itself back to sleep.”"
-PASADENA WEEKLY
"Film fans may recall La Botz fronting a bar band in Ghost World, strumming for fellow inmates in Animal Factory or, most recently, crooning “Wishing Well” as a mercenary in Rambo. The bluesman’s fifth album, independently released in time for his latest tour of tattoo parlors across the lower forty-eight, is a bare-boned journey deep into dark nights of the soul; La Botz jokes these are “songs to kill or be killed to.” But, notwithstanding the black humor of “The Devil Lives in My Throat,” there’s nothing funny or half-assed about the way he strip-mines bleak, hypnotic beauty from heartbreak and fingerpicked acoustic settings on ballads like “When Your Trouble Gets Like Mine” or the harrowing “Depression Brings Me Flowers” (“The bad news is I don’t believe in happiness/ The good news is I know the ground quite well/ I go to hell and back with eyes wide open/ And come up to smell the flowers by my bed”). Pain rarely felt so sweet."
- FADE IN MAGAZINE
"Sing This to Yourself … and Other Suggestions for a Personal Apocalypse (Charnel Ground Records)
Jake La Botz is clearly going to shoot his own face off. From the opening strains of “Hungry Again (Put Me in a Hole),” he’s a little Bob Dylan and a whole lotta suicide. The next song on his new album Sing This to Yourself begins with the word “depression” sung like Sylvia Plath smoked a carton of Luckys.
This is not the evil Jake La Botz we knew and loved, whose deceptively old-man blues-growls emotionally abused his woman in “Things You’ve Got to Do for Me” – “and if you see another woman, just hope she ain’t better-looking, baby” – and who first got drunk at the age of 12, and who then rode the dog (the Greyhound, not Rick Santorum-bait).
Now he doesn’t see her purse on the table today, and the world ended yesterday, and his family’s gone, and his home’s gone, and I’m sure the bitch took his dog too, or – as she did in the epic Jon Wayne Band song – peed on the carpet and shot his horse.
Oh, Jake La Botz! Can’t you find a new woman to smack around and make you happy? We don’t like seeing you like this."
–Rebecca Schoenkopf
-LA CITYBEAT
Dark blues from Jake La Botz
"La Botz’s music is not all minor-key sadness. “The music is sweet and tender and lyrics are going a different direction,” he says, “a nice cocktail. If we look directly into our experience of sadness, there’s so much there, so many different shades and flavors, it’s never the same thing and never the same thing twice. There’s always some beauty and sweetness there. That was kind of the point. We live in a society so afraid to feel and have a full experience. This is, in a way, a reaction to that. We’re all totally alone with our feelings. With the music, it’s an opportunity to open up to your own situation.”...The new album starts with “Hungry Again (Put Me in a Hole)” and that hole theme is one La Botz returns to later on. A graveyard fixation? “Put me in the hole says it so plainly, it’s the plainest simplest way,” says La Botz. “On the last album, things were a little mythological and abstract. Here I wanted to say it more directly. What says it more directly than being put in a hole? Claustrophobia, in the ground, not much light… “ LaBotz plays 21 Nickels and the Brendan Behan."
- https://www.tradebit.com