[SACD-R][OF] Steve Strauss - Just like Love - 2005 (Acoustic Guitar)

Steve Strauss wrote all the songs here, except Youngstown by Bruce Springsteen. He is a recently-discovered singer-songwriter & this is his 2nd album. His main band is made up of Steve Strauss, vocals & guitar; Chris Jones guitar, Hrolfur Vagnsson, accordion & Hans-Jorg Maucksch, fretless bass. Other guest artists appear on various tracks. I 1st heard this album on David Robinson’s (Positive Feedback) system. It took 1 cut to know that this album was really special. I requested a copy for review & was delighted to receive one. – Clay Swartz
With “Powderhouse Road“, Steve Strauss proved himself to be a singer/songwriter of remarkable depth of feeling & sensitivity. This is also true of Just Like Love. The songs of Steve Strauss are, once again, not exactly easy to approach. Maybe some elements of his art can be attributed to his job as a social worker in Vestal, NY. Bitter-sweet melancholy, but also a trace of cynicism gets hold of the listener at the same time.
Steve Strauss sings “about longing, reaching, touching, losing, & then doing it all over again…”
Steve Strauss with his laid-back style of guitar playing (a quality further developed by fellow Stockfisch musicians like Chris Jones) is none other than – a poet. You can feel this when he sings of the golden era of youth spent in the shadow of the Argyle Bridge when war was only real “in far-off countries”. You can feel this when in “Angel”– in the beginning meant to be a comment on life in New York, which after September 11th reached an even deeper level of meaning – he sings of emptiness, loneliness, homelessness.
In Just Like Love Strauss creates a mixture of traditional tunes & touchingly naive lyrics (“Sunday Best”) & critical views of society (as in his cover version of the Springsteen classic “Youngstown”). While even in “Jerusalem” (“Powderhouse Road”) he sounded a bit like T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi”, the title track “Just Like Love” & the cryptic “The Dirt” are introspective musings, & Steve’s play reaches a dreamlike intensity.
~Elusive disc also has sound samples.
Audaud review:
Steve Strauss wrote all the songs here, except Youngstown by Bruce Springsteen. He is a recently-discovered singer-songwriter & this is his 2nd album. His main band is made up of Steve Strauss, vocals & guitar; Chris Jones guitar, Hrolfur Vagnsson, accordion & Hans-Jorg Maucksch, fretless bass. Other guest artists appear on various tracks. I 1st heard this album on David Robinson’s (Positive Feedback) system. It took 1 cut to know that this album was really special. I requested a copy for review & was delighted to receive one.
Strauss has a very blues-influenced style of singing & a fairly deep voice. The songs are filled with a feeling of real life happenings. He has a somewhat laid back guitar playing style, which is caught with great clarity in this recording. The accompanying instruments are amazingly well recorded & vibrant. Stockfisch Records is a German audiophile label. The only thing that keeps this album from being the best sounding pop SACD that I have heard is a slight overemphasis on the bass frequencies. The stereo SACD layer has slightly more focus than the 5.1 mix, but the 5.1 mix involves you more in the music. Bass enthusiasts may really like the bass. Systems without strong deep bass may not even notice the exaggeration. The song quality is better than 99.99% albums. I can sit & listen to this album over & over again. There are very, very few albums that I feel this way about. I especially like the emotion that he gives his cover of Youngstown – Springsteen’s version has nowhere near as much emotion. This is what an album should be: great music, great sound & over 60 minutes of sheer audio catharsis. I look forward to other titles from this artist & this label. Very highly recommended!
- Clay Swartz
C. Hammer in stereoplay 7 / 05: “Produzent und Stockfisch- Labelchef Günter Pauler zeigt exemplarisch, wie durch ausgeklügeltes Sounddesign der Charakter verschiedener Lieder individuell ausgeleuchtet werden kann. Musikalisch zeigt sich Strauss, kongenial begleitet unter anderem von Saitenkumpel Chris Jones, als klassischer Singer-Song- writer und lässt sich in 12 intimen Eigenkompositionen und einer Coverversion von Bruce Springsteens “Youngstown” tief in die Seele blicken.” C. Barnbeck in Stereo 7 / 05: “Die Aufnahmen sind sauber und differenziert, enthalten ein Maximum an Dynamik und eine Auflösung, die auch noch feinste Details im Ober- tonspektrum herausarbeitet. Die dunkle, facettenreiche Stimme – Steve Strauss präsentiert sich in bester Singer/ Songwriter-Tradition – steht stets im Zentrum des Ge- schehens, ohne die Instrumente in den Hintergrund zu drängen. Keine Frage, dass Steve Strauss mit “Just Like Love” eine audiophile Perle geschaffen hat.”