by Don SnowdenSlow Fuse cuts back markedly on the sweeping sonic experimentation of the critically acclaimed The Wolf That House Built for more vocals and a song-oriented approach built on a foundation of acoustic guitar meeting high-tech studio sound. This time, rather than fashion a musical extension, Skip McDonald apparently set his sights on imagining and re-creating (to a point) the ambience of the Mississippi Delta world from which the blues took root. "On the Beat Sound" is framed around a sampled Howlin' Wolf interview snippet that conceptually unites the disc. The moody arrangement sets the musical tone -- it sounds more like an attempt at updating an old field holler than using a traditional form as a launching pad. The title track is a country jog trot; banjo figures prominently in "Speak Easy"; and "Black Diamond Train" is a train song, featuring harmonica and hushed backing voices, motivated by Keith LeBlanc's drums. "Storm is rising/Blues falls down like drops of rain" is a memorable lyrical couplet, and much of Slow Fuse is geared toward taking the blues as a metaphoric experience. "Going Down Slow" and "Must Have Been the Devil" are classic song titles used as hooks for new lyrics dealing with 21st century blues themes, and the closing "Don't nobody know my troubles but God" refrain on "Black Diamond Train" echoes other vintage standards. But the music doesn't rise to the occasion, especially compared to a masterpiece like The Wolf That House Built, which presaged Moby's Play; it just trails away into an evanescent zone far too often, especially at the end. Early releases of Slow Fuse contained a ten-track second disk of dubs (timid by On-U-Sound standards) that didn't offer any radical reinterpretations -- it's really not worth searching out and paying collectors' prices for.