Pedro Carvalho in Via Nocturna (December 24, 2020)
A title like Delta Tales takes us back to the southern spirit of the cotton fields. And, in fact, Texan John Blangero, who debuts discographically with his project Sun King Rising, manages to have his music umbilically linked to the more traditional southern sounds.
In this collection of 10 themes, one feels intensely all that black spirit and spirituality. Delta Tales tells stories based on blues, jazz, gospel, soul, and southern rock. And it is from this mixture of diversified influences captured in the deepest territory that a musical work is born that has both musicality and genetics, whether or not Blangero was a renowned geneticist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine. Musically, Delta Tales brings all the spices of the genre, applied in a balanced way and which gain particular prominence by using choirs and horns.
It is with these details that this work is released to levels of greater emotionality and creativity, although, throughout the disc, balance and homogeneity are the dominant note. For southerners or not, the important thing to note is that Delta Tales is composed of a set of very pleasant listening themes.