Featuring Sneaky Pete Kleinow on steel guitar, Burrito Deluxe heads back to the comfortable, if no longer contextually groundbreaking, terrain of the Flying Burrito Brothers. Kleinow left that group in 1972, four years after forming it with Byrds refugees Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman. The intervening three decades found him turning to session work as well as pursuing his parallel career in film animation and special effects (pre-Burritos, he was the head animator for the Gumby series), all the while taking good care of his Nudie suit.
Georgia Peach is this new lineup’s tribute to Parsons, whose short career has brought forth tributes in excess of his own relatively small output. Most of the lead vocals are handled by Tommy Spurlock, Carlton Moody or Willie Watson. They revisit a handful of numbers associated with the original band, with Moody generally standing in for Parsons. His voice places him in the top of the class of alt-country and modern-day Nashville, but it lacks the alluring ache of Parsons.
There are a handful of new originals which suffer from assembly-line predictability and a surfeit of cliches. Worst among them is the closing “G.P.”; the previous thirteen tracks pay tribute with an honest resonance that this song’s tired conceit completely lacks. “Hickory Wind” benefits from the always-welcome wild-card presence of Garth Hudson, who pulls fractured glimpses of babbling brooks and forest glades from his synthesizer.
