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BLUES

Buddy Guy, Born to Play Guitar

(Sony) ****

A modern blues record has to be really something to get our attention. After all, when you’ve got Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King or the other legends of the genre to choose from in your collection, the modern recording usually can’t compete.

In the ’60s, Guy was the young gun of the blues, hampered somewhat in his career by his Chess label, which was not keen on Guy reproducing the electricity of his live shows in the studio. But then Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton came along, developing directly from the inspiration of Guy’s live shows. Word started to spread, albeit slowly.

Clapton said of him in a 1985 interview: “Buddy Guy is by far, and without a doubt, the best guitar player alive.’’

Clapton and Beck paid tribute by joining him on 1991’s Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues. His 2013 two-CD Rhythm & Blues set was a star-heavy “comeback’’ record, although no one really needed a Guy album with guest turns from Kid Rock and Aerosmith.

This one takes that concept, refines it and blows its predecessor out of the water. There are guests, appropriate ones such as Joss Stone and Van Morrison, and a sprinkling of brass-charged R & B to sweeten some diamond-hard electric blues and rock’n’roll. Guy is clearly in charge and there are lashings of his fret-burning electric guitar work.

The opening number, the title tune, goes back to his Louisiana beginnings to tell his story atop the kind of blues Muddy Waters himself might have delivered, complete with the kind of piano that Otis Spann would have played with Muddy.

Billy Gibbons, of ZZ Top, shares vocals on the thumping boogie of Wear You Out. That’s a guitar they are singing about, although it could be a reference to any young guitar-slinger who dares to get in the ring with Guy. “I’m still around, ain’t slowing down,’’ Guy sings, while delivering the type of guitar that fired so many of Britain’s blues-inspired players of the ’60s.

Occasionally, blues lyrics can feel a little musty (“I got a back up mamma if mamma No 1 is not around’’) but somehow the music doesn’t, whether it’s the swinging jump blues of Too Late
or the brassy minor-key soul of Crying Out of One Eye.

Guy takes things back to the ’50s with Stone for the sweet R & B pop of (Baby) You Got What It Takes; delivers a vocal performance the equal of his mighty guitar skills on Crazy World; and unleashes a guitar attack that would pin a club-goer to the back wall in Smarter Than I Was.

The finest of the guest turns is from Morrison on Flesh and Bone, a superb gospel tune dedicated to the late B.B. King.

“When you go your spirit lives on,’’ Guy sings, with all the conviction of one who has fought the good fight for blues music for most of his 79 years.

This isn’t someone going through the motions of a now-archaic musical form. This is the real thing. Damn right he’s still got the blues, luckily for the rest of us.

Noel Mengel

ROCK

Jason Isbell, Something More Than Free

(South-Eastern) ****

Isbell swore off the bottle and delivered a career-best batch of tunes for his breakthrough Southeastern album, which had some great tunes about barflies, it must be said. The opening tune here, If It Takes a Lifetime, is from the point of view of a character taking a vow to live a better life (“I thought the highway loved me but she beat me like a drum’’), a country-folk tune with sweet fiddle from his wife and bandmate Amanda Shires. There are songs about growing up (How to Forget
), and farming families (Children of Children). Then there are the ones at the highest level like the title tune, about a labourer doing what it takes to stay alive. And pick of the crop, To a Band That I Loved, about someone met out on the road, where Isbell sings: “Somehow you put down my fears on a page/When I still had nothing to say/How I miss you today.’’ There are not many happy endings in music, but this song is as hopeful as it is heartbreaking. Two from two proves it: Isbell is up there with the top rank of today’s songwriters.

Noel Mengel

FOLK

Olivia Chaney, The Longest River

(Nonesuch) ***1/2

First, there’s that voice, clear and pure like a bubbling English brook in summertime. That longest river could be life itself or a river of folk song, flowing from generation to generation. The album opens with
False Bride, a traditional ballad arranged by Chaney. Clearly she has studied the greats of English folk-rock, Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson in particular. And like those two giants, she brings the tradition into the present. She reveals her doubts to the world on the Joni Mitchell-like Imperfections

. Her lyrics are precise, like her diction, the morning-after regrets of Loose Change (“Loose change/She hears that same refrain/But loosely changed’’), the annoyingly social household of Too Social (“Preparing for love/Preparing for lust/Repairing for love’’). On Swimming in the Longest River she says that the river is denial but it never sounds like a joke. Everything is kept spare. All the better to focus you on that voice and her words, things we should be hearing much more of in the years to come.

Noel Mengel

THEATRE

New Broadway Cast, Anything Goes

(Sony) ****

You’ve seen the show. Now hear the music. Well, if you have seen the show you’re probably still humming tunes radiating the joy of the melodic magic spun by Cole Porter, one of a team of greats who created American music theatre masterpieces before, during and after two World Wars. Think George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, prodigiously gifted and now coming to new life through revivals of their works. This Cole Porter CD, perhaps not classical in a strict sense, is a classic in its own milieu. A Broadway cast re-creates the show’s top tunes I Get a Kick Out of You, Blow Gabriel, Blow, You’re the Top (how did Porter the lyricist think up all those rhyming metaphors?) and the title tune Anything Goes. The fun continues in lesser-known numbers, some from other Porter musicals, such as You’d be so Easy to Love, Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye, all with a vitality that makes a piece of theatre spark, however pithy
the tale.

Patricia Kelly

ROCK

Neil Young + Promise of the Real, The Monsanto Years

(Warner) ***1/2

Some of Young’s best records have been raw affairs, usually with his long-time partners in Crazy Horse. If someone dropped tracks like this album’s A New Day on you in a blindfold test, even Young experts might pick the band as Crazy Horse. It’s not but this younger outfit, including Willie Nelson’s son Lukas on guitar, do just fine as deputies, with loads of Young’s strident electric guitar lines and the band’s unvarnished backing vocals. As you can see from the title, Young is in protest mode, raging against corporations, genetically modified crops and other ills he sees in society. But the music isn’t as overly earnest as that sounds, with a twinkle in Young’s eye and the band sounding quite jaunty on tracks like A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop. Big Box rages for eight minutes as Young spits lyrics about small business in retreat and towns boarded up. His young chums sound gleeful at finding themselves in such august company. Who else who has been making records for 50 years who takes such joy from leaving on the rough edges?

Noel Mengel

Raise a Glass by Brimstone

METAL

Brimstone, Raise a Glass

(Filthpipe) ****

Is this the first (and last) heavy metal album to feature Julia Gillard? The former prime minister appears via sound bite on Words of War, which confronts the uncomfortable notion some soldiers actually enjoy the primal “kill or be killed” element of combat. Queensland pair Boris Billing and Pete Black describe their sound as beer metal, and there’s nothing pretentious about the straight-up melodic heavy rock. It does have an impressive pedigree, however, with producer Steve James (Sex Pistols, The Jam, Thin Lizzy, Cold Chisel, Screaming Jets) and engineer Tim Young (The Beatles, Iron Maiden, Elton John). Billing channels Ian Astbury on Hit the Steel and Billy Idol on resident power ballad Level Ground, whose chorus has all the grandiosity of a Pink Floyd epic. There are Viking war cries, werewolf howls and enough big chunky guitar riffs to please the gods of rock. Speaking of whom, the album closes out with a faithful rendition of Led Zep’s Communication Breakdown.

John O’Brien

AMERICANA

Warren Haynes feat. Railroad Earth, Ashes & Dust

(Provogue) ****

Best known as a lead guitarist for Southern rock jam bands the Allman Brothers and Gov’t Mule, Warren Haynes steps out as a solo artist with Ashes & Dust, an even rootsier collaboration with New Jersey-based acoustic folk and Americana sextet Railroad Earth. While Haynes is in unfamiliar territory against a countrified canvas of fiddle, banjo and mandolin, his fluid electric guitar and slide nonetheless coexist with a new-found love of acoustic fingerpicking. He also wraps that whisky sour voice around a dozen solidly constructed songs, some of which he’s hoarded for decades. The token cover is a duet with Grace Potter (of the Nocturnals) on Stevie Nicks’s Gold Dust Woman, but the centrepiece is a co-write with the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh. Spots of Time, based on a Wordsworth poem, curiously echoes Canadian band Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s 1974 hit You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, and had been part of the Allman Brothers’ live set for years but they never got around to recording it. When he left the Allmans last year, Haynes wisely took it with him.

Phil Stafford

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