Steve Strauss - Just like Love (2005) [SACD]

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.