It's a funny thing about an artist of Eric Clapton's
caliber. He can take fairly mainstream material--good, but still
mainstream--and do nothing especially ear-catching with it, and yet it
still grabs and holds your attention. How? Well, there's Clapton's
unquestionable talent, of course, but perhaps more important is the
leavening it's received from experience. It's that which raises
Reptile from the level of fairly pleasant listening to something
you end up paying close attention to.
For this release, Clapton shifts musical gears with just
about every track. He begins with the quietly active acoustic title
track, moving to a back-to-basics "Got You On My Mind" before leaping to a
rockier version of J.J. Cale's "Travelin' Light." Even then, instead of
settling in, he moves on to soft-rock original "Believe in Life" before
hopping back to a solid blues with "Come Back Baby." The whole album is
like this, and as this practice of mixing and matching musical styles
seems to be a trend in the blues world lately, one might accuse Clapton of
bandwagon-jumping--except that he's always been one to try his hand
across genres. Still, Clapton achieves a consistency of mood that often
escapes younger, less honed musicians, which is a major reason to listen
to this album.
The liner text (written by Clapton himself) explains the
title: A reptile, he says, is a sort of local character, an established
personality, and there's a sort of barroom feel to Reptile, too.
Not that a couple of tracks don't stand out, like the original "Find
Myself," which one could imagine couples getting up and dancing to, or
Clapton's take on Stevie Wonder's "I Ain't Gonna Stand for It." But
overall, there's something very relaxed and low-key about Slowhand's
latest, conveying an impression of the final set of the night at a blues
bar, right before last call.
-- Originally appeared in Blues Revue No. 69,
July/August 2001, pp. 56-57