The Electric Mile

1	Unified 3:07
2	Praise Up 3:43
3	Night of the Living Dead 4:36
4	Parasite 6:17
5	Hopeless Case 3:43
6	Free at Last 2:22
7	Shy Girl 3:32
8	Rain Jam 1:04
9	Electric Mile 3:40
10	Sara's Song 4:59
11	100 Magic Rings 3:52
12	Poison 4:19
13	Free at Last (Reprise) 5:55

Barnes & Noble

He's never made as big a deal of his melanin deficiency as some artists working in genres often thought of as reserved for African Americans, but that's just a small part of what makes G. Love so compelling. The Philly-bred singer/spieler/string-slinger has spent the better part of a decade digging into crates that house blues, hip-hop, and uncategorizable sounds of the street, and he's yet to run out of ways to bring the noise. Love (a.k.a. Garrett Dutton III) and his erstwhile rhythm section don't break a lot of new ground on The Electric Mile, their fifth studio album, but amiably funky back-porch observations like "100 Magic Rings" and the good-'n'-greasy title track make those old haunts seem mighty inviting. The band is a bit less successful when they stray from their stomping grounds (as on the faux-Jamaican "Praise Up"), but those digressions are blessedly infrequent. Simple pleasures don't always get their due these days, but when they're put forth as winningly as G. Love does it here, it's easy to surrender to their charms. David Sprague

All Music Guide

Like G. Love & Special Sauce's previous albums, The Electric Mile isn't easy to categorize. Is it alternative rock, psychedelic rock, retro-soul, funk, or hip-hop? Actually, this diverse, unpredictable CD is a combination of those things -- and the group also shows its appreciation of reggae, blues, and folk. True to form, vocalist G. Love and his colleagues keep things unpredictable; you never know from one song to the next if they will tend to favor retro-soul ("Night of the Living Dead"), hip-hop ("Parasite," "Electric Mile"), folk-rock ("Sara's Song"), psychedelic blues-rock ("Poison"), or reggae ("Unified"). And the impressive thing is that G. Love can go in so many different directions and never fail to sound distinctive, which is something he has in common with Prince and David Bowie. But while The Electric Mile (which is G. Love's fifth album) has more plusses than minuses, it isn't perfect. A few of the tunes sound unfocused, and not everything that G. Love & Special Sauce try is successful -- occasionally, a song will miss its mark. But more often than not, the trio's risk-taking pays off on this generally rewarding, if imperfect, CD. Alex Henderson