What's Your Sign?

Album Review

As the first track of Joe Cassady's What's Your Sign? rises in volume, a warm, spacious sound greets the listener. It's a quiet, relaxed groove, classic rock dominated by guitars, a heavy bass, and a steady backbeat. Cassady's slurred vocals, somewhere between cynically reserved and "cool," offer the final piece of the arrangement, delivering a surrealistic lyric riddled with impenetrable symbolism. It's an attractive sound that settles into a steadier groove and literary pretension on "Prometheus Bound," with Cassady mixing a bizarre opening line ("I'm feeling like Prometheus tonight"), straight-ahead rock, and a reference to Jack Kerouac. For classic rock fans, What's Your Sign? has much to recommend it, though borrowing heavily from a well-used style begs a number of questions. Very often, Cassady and the West End Sound remind one of some variation of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers weighted down with literary references. Cassady's vocal style easily falls within the Dylan-Petty mold, while the West End Sound occasionally sound like an updated version of Stones/Heartbreakers. The slide guitar part on "I'd Rather Be You" seems as though it were borrowed from Duane Allman and the organ in "Can Opener" from a mid-'60s Dylan session. All of these factors finally add up to make What's Your Sign? interesting but too familiar, steady rocking, but too indebted to the past. ~ Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr., Rovi