After that battering, the polished but relatively low key Please Call Home , with its weary Gregg Allman vocal and Leave My Blues at Home, which is mostly groove without going overboard on substance (impressive solos, though) probably seem like a bit of a let down, but wind things up rather neatly and would both have been FM-friendly.
Or at least they would have been if Hughesy was doing the DJ bit...
At a touch over thirty minutes, Idlewild South might seem a bit on the skimpy side time-wise, which is, of course, why I’d point the potential listener towards the two for less than the price of one Beginnings (I paid $10.99 at iTunes) which has both of the band’s first two albums in their entirety. Really, at the price you can’t go wrong, though there are issues when you split the tracks into the individual albums (my iTunes has the two albums listed between The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet and Teddy Thompson’s Bella).
The debut might have delivered a touch more power, but for production, songwriting and performance Idlewild South is definitely a superior package when you line it up beside The Allman Brothers Band, largely due to what Dickey Betts brings to the party as a second source of original material. As a result there’s a fair bit more sonic more variety, and while it mightn’t be 100% killer there’s a definite lack of filler.
The band were, at this point, still in the process of establishing themselves and exploring the possibilities, and the apex of their achievement is just around the corner with At Fillmore East.