The Black Crowes – Amorica

‘Amorica’ is the third album by The Black Crowes. Spawned from their unreleased scrapped album ‘Tall’, ‘Amorica’ was released in late 1994 on American Recordings and re-issued in the UK in 1998 with two bonus tracks. The album was banned from some stores like Walmart and Kmart, due to its sexually explicit album cover, which features a woman’s crotch wearing a United States flag thong with pubic hair sticking out. The picture was from the cover of a July 1976 Hustler magazine. As bold and ramshackle, heartfelt and personal as rock and roll itself, ‘Amorica’ finds the Black Crowes finding themselves. Still defiant in their untrendy insistence that the guitar bravado and rebel pose of classic rock furnishes an inspiration as authentic as that of blues and country, the Atlanta sextet now spin off from their heavy ’60s and ’70s influences so fluidly that they shake freer than ever before from the retrorock tag that has dogged the band. The Crowes haven’t ceased their cocky pillaging of the universal jukebox – echoes of the Stones and Led Zep resound – but in jolting the mix with offbeat kicks (Latino rhythms, wah-wah guitar, strange vocal treatments), they sound remarkably fresh.

2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, 180 gram