March 3rd, 2008
Steve Smith
I’m usually right about a lot of stuff. Honestly. I’m usually spot on with, well, everything. I mean seriously, it’s frightening. Like I told my girlfriend when she was pregnant that we were going to have a little girl, and guess what? We had a girl. Or when she dropped two slices of bread into the toaster the other morning as I was reading, I told her “Your toasts are ready” just as the toaster popped them out.
I sometimes ask her how much of a heavy burden it must be to live with someone who was always right. She, of course, doesn’t answer such questions. Oh, foolish pride, foolish pride.
It is with great humility that I, today, kind of, sort of, admit that I was perhaps, maybe wrong about Steve Smith, DJ and frontman for Dirty Vegas. I may, just may, have written off his first solo effort too quickly, as I had not heard That Town, title track of said solo project.
It’s a compelling, gorgeous track, both surprisingly atmospheric and intuitively groovy, upon which lays Smith’s emphatic vocals as the final design element to make the song legitimately wantful. Throw in a latin-styled percussion solo for organic measure, and what else can someone like me do than sort of state an emphatic “damn you, Steve Smith for forcing me to obliquely admit I was wrong.”