Seventeen

AMG Review of Seventeen

John D. Luerssen
All Music Guide

With Seventeen, the Samples' Sean Kelly and Tom Askin strip down some of their band's most beloved songs and present them intimately to a mindful Quinnipiac College audience. More than just a souvenir of that evening, this compelling live disc -- named for both the song and the number of tracks -- gives band staples like "Who Am I?" and "Seany Boy" a welcome, relaxed feel. Recorded at the end of a nationwide acoustic trek, Kelly and Askin (along with Vertical Horizon's Ed Toth on percussion) perform their distinctive Sting-meets-the Grateful Dead material, using piano accents to warm these extracts from the Samples' songbook. Some could balk that Seventeen is a stopgap release between the outfit's last studio album, 2001's Return to Earth, and its imminent follow-up, but by breathing new life into aging numbers like "Feel Us Shaking" and "Close to the Fires" (both from their 1989 self-titled debut), these nuggets sound new again.