"Back on the roots scene after a long break, Sampou never wavers from a steady tone of genuineness as she sings sharply observant songs that she writes about disarray and failed communication in relationships. She has the ability to dramatize the sense of hurt at the heart of the characters without floundering in self-pity or weak sentiment. Guitarists Kevin Barry and Mike Dinallo prove important to the flow of her honky-tonk music." Frank John Hadley, DOWNBEAT
“'Lonesomeville' evokes a Tom Waits-like world…." Sing Out Magazine
"Powerfully expressive, Les Sampou has been tested in the trenches of life and survived brilliantly. Her new album, "Lonesomeville,'' is a personal Top Ten favorite of the year. She invests many songs with the emotional honesty of Lucinda Williams, probing love in all of its complexity while belting the heck out of the music. She has a passionate, rockabilly-blues edge that lifts your spirits high, followed by ballads that dig into your soul like few artists can. She also enlists some of Boston's true all-stars to back her -- including Andy Plaisted, Kevin Barry, Michael Dinallo and Jimmy Ryan -- to make this an album you'll want to revisit eagerly and often.''
--- STEVE MORSE, longtime Boston Globe Correspondent who has also contributed to Billboard and Rolling Stone
LES SAMPOU • Lonesomeville
"Sampou’s passionate vocals are simply stunning, now ballsy and rough-edged, then purry and seductive, while the only problem with her originals songs is trying to decide which is the least sensational—there are only nine of them, but there’s absolutely no filler here...the title track is a veritable monster, but Oil & Water, Lonely Nights & Lonely Days, My My My and As I Sleep are the kind of tracks that flummox DJs when they have to choose just one. Judging by her close to home CD release ‘tour,’ Sampou seems to be one of those World Famous In Boston acts we hear so little about, but if you’ve given up on Lucinda Williams. I strongly suggest you check her out." John Conquest, 3rd Coast Music, Austin TX
JOHN CONQUEST/THIRD COAST MUSIC/ALBUM OF THE YEAR REVIEW/SXSW
"You may have noticed that music writers and DJs commonly mark the New Year by putting out or programming ‘Best Of’ lists or spotlight shows of the previous year’s albums, and you may have noticed that the FAR reporters and I are no exceptions... Looking at 2010’s offerings, I started off with 13 contenders for Album of the Year, so right there I had a problem. OK, first off, a little tactical voting. Eilen Jewell’s Butcher Holler; A Tribute To Loretta Lynn (Signature Sounds) and Blaze Foley’s Sittin’ By The Road (Lost Art) were no-brainers for, respectively, #1 VA/Tribute Album and #1 Reissue/Historic Album, which took care of them. Then Yvette Landry’s Should Have Known (Soko) and Zoe Muth & The Lost High Rollers (SonicBoom) were both Debuts, so they got the top spots in that category. Now things are looking a little better, I’m down to nine, of which, reluctantly, I had to move New Mystery Girl ‘s Twist City (self) into Debut as well, a bit of a technicality as Chrissy Flatt does have albums out under her own name, but at least she got a #1 for Sally’s Rumble as Song of the Year. Now, there are only two albums that have to go, but which two? Better way of looking at it, who absolutely has to stay? Much easier: Sarah Borges’ Live Singles (self), Marti Brom’s Not For Nothin’ (Goofin’ [Finland]/Ripsaw), Caleb Klauder’s Western Country (Quicksilver), Carrie Rodriguez’s Love And Circumstance (Ninth Street Opus), Les Sampou’s Lonesomeville (self) and Sally Spring’s Made Of Stars (Sniffinpip). Now we’re getting somewhere, except for the really hard part, ranking them. I don’t know how many combinations I tried out to see how they looked, though early on I abandoned numbering because that was next door to meaningless, but eventually I hit on Sampou, Borges, Brom, Spring, Rodriguez, Klauder and that seemed about right. So why Les Sampou, who only made #2 in the FAR charts and #6 in FAR & Away? Actually, there’s an easy answer. What swung it her way was that while I’d loaded a couple three favorite songs from each of the other albums onto my iPod, I had Lonesomeville almost in its entirety, because I couldn’t decide which, apart from Sam & Alice, were the best tracks, and I was still listening to it when I didn’t have to (music writers are like sharks, we have to keep moving forward, forever hunting for fresh meat). This strongly suggested that, while its rivals were all extremely good, Sampou’s album was, in my opinion at least, if not actually perfect, at least within spitting distance of it. There are, I imagine, few artists who don’t think that their latest album is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I came to find that it’s actually quite difficult to discuss an album with an artist who already knows that you think it was the best one to cross your desk in an entire year. However, Sampou did shed some light on what made Lonesomeville so special. While she says of her four previous releases, Sweet Perfume (self, 1994), Fall From Grace (Rounder, 1996), Les Sampou (Rounder, 1999) and Borrowed & Blue (self, 2006), “every album is different,” one unifying theme in reviews of the first three (Borrowed & Blue was solo blues covers) was admiration for Sampou’s songwriting. In my original review (#163/252, August, 2010), I noted that while there were only nine tracks, all originals, “Sampou seems to be a shrewd judge of her own material (never a given with songwriters),” and, it turns out, she started out with 25 to 30 songs, paring them down to create an album with a theme, “The others were all over the place. This time, I picked the nine songs that best complemented each other.” Sampou also lavishes praise on colleagues such as JP Jones, who has co-credit on the sinuous, mesmerizing title track. “I gave him the credit because he suggested slowing it down, which was absolutely the right thing to do.” She also lauds not just producer Chris Rival and the outstanding Boston musicians, notably Kevin Barry (guitars) and Jimmy Ryan (mandolin), who backed her, but singles out Ducky Carlisle, who mixed the album and helped her fine tune the vocals, to stunning effect. “I’m extremely proud of it” is a fairly stock artist comment on a new album, but when Les Sampou adds, “there’s a shine around it,” she gets no argument from me, in fact I couldn’t have put it better myself. There was a time when I was leery about inviting people I’d never seen to perform at 3CM Presents, but this year I’ve thrown caution to the winds, because if Les Sampou (and Yvette Landy and Zoe Muth) are half as good as they sound on their records, they’ll knock our socks off. JC
"A sweet, twangy set with deep blues roots... There are echoes of Delbert McClinton, Lucinda Williams, Bonnie Raitt and various other roots-music heroes, amid a strong set of original material. Ms. Sampou might be living in Lonesomeville, but she originally hails from Connecticut... and for a Yankee, she does a nice job getting greasy and gritty... Best on the uptempo numbers, with some nice David Lindley-esque slide guitar. Worth a spin!" Hillbilly Fillys
