NEW ALBUMS
A selection of new and reissued guitar releases, including Album Of The Month
JD SIMO JD SIMO Crows Feet Records ✪✪✪✪✪
Imagine Motown meets Woodstock, with large dashes of blues and you get JD Simo, a
Chicago born, Nashville-based singer and guitarist. This is his second album and the
10 tracks are corkers; vibrant soul groovers sit next to psychedelic rock workouts with melodic earworms aplenty. JD can riff, wail and wah wah with skill, taste and bravado, channelling Hendrix, Curtis Mayfield, Jimmy Nolan and numerous other iconic six-stringers with verve. Opener, The Movement dips into Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield territory due to JD’s falsetto voice and a cracking soul groove. Love is James Brown meets Prince dashed with fuzzed-out 70s rock. His blues changes over a James Brown groove is evident on Out Of Sight – real good-time funk. The huge-sounding groove and fuzz guitar on Higher Plane is impressive and infectious – like 90s Lenny Kravitz but at the next level. As for lead single, One Of These Days, JD’s Curtis Mayfield leanings are well to the fore – beautiful clean chords and sweet falsetto singing. Then you get to Take That, a short instrumental that sees him playing crazy up-tempo country guitar against a rock and roll ‘train’ rhythm. Jaw dropping. If you’re looking for a new song-centred artist with great taste and energy, JD Simo is simply fantastic!
JOE BONAMASSA A NEW DAY YESTERDAY (20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) Provogue ✪✪✪✪
Is it really 20 years since Joe Bonamassa, that fleet-fingered blues wunderkind, burst onto the scene in a frenzy of fretboard fandangos? Seems like it was only yesterday. In order to honour the occasion, the Les Paul-toting (and these days many other fine vintage instruments) blues boy has not only re-released this, his first album, but taken the opportunity to remix, remaster, and even redo his vocals. “The reason we went back and remixed it was because I never felt like I deserved a guy like Tom Dowd to produce my first album… I wasn’t developed enough as a musician myself to rise to his level.” Alas, Tom Dowd died in 2002 and so
Joe’s regular producer Kevin Shirley has hopped behind the desk and re-energised all. The result? It’s pretty damn good, especially our standout track, Cradle Rock.
KANSAS THE ABSENCE OF PRESENCE Inside Out Music ✪✪✪✪
Kansas has an impressive history of music and musicians. The new album features nine songs that demonstrate many of their trademarks – strong riffs, meticulous arrangements, impressive vocal harmonies and great musicianship. Sharing guitar duties are Richard Williams and Zak Rizvi and they make an impressive team with clean and distorted tones and well-crafted parts. With prog it’s typical to have broad extremes of presentation, and that’s evident here – intimate through to cinematic, ballads to pounding rockers. The title track is a good representation with ambient piano intro, punchy rock riffs, vocal harmonies, rich keyboard strings, burning organ and soaring guitar solos. If melodic prog rock and a really satisfying listen is your thing, Kansas remains one of your very best sources. Standout track is, we reckon, Throwing Mountains.
KIRK FLETCHER MY BLUES PATHWAY Cleopatra Records ✪✪✪✪✪
With this new album, Fletcher strikes gold while digging down to his roots. We’ve been keeping an eye on Kirk’s career since he visited our offices one day while on tour in the UK and left us open-mouthed with his soulful, heartfelt blues playing. My Blues Pathway is the sixth solo album from the exFabulous Thunderbirds guitarist and, you know what? It’s a delight from start to finish. The Stratinfused passion on Love Is More
Than A Word should be enough to catapult Kirk into the blues hall of fame alone, and No Place To Go is amazing. But the whole album is a feast of delights. Channelling BB King’s melodic restraint here and tearing the place apart Buddy Guy style there, it’s a rollercoaster ride through the very best of what the blues has to offer. We can’t wait to see him back on the road
SOFT MACHINE LIVE AT THE BAKED POTATO Dyad Records ✪✪✪✪
The quartet of John Etheridge (guitar), Roy Babbington (bass), John Marshall (drums) and Theo Travis (sax, flute, Rhodes) is now back with a live album recorded in 2019 at LA’s famous Baked Potato during their world tour. Featuring 12 tracks that run the gamut of two minutes through to seven in duration, it’s an impressive presentation of recent and past music from a well-honed band of virtuoso players. For guitar fans, the first full-on showing for John Etheridge is Profile (Pt1) where he riffs under Theo’s saxophone before cutting loose with staggering bursts of soloing. After that, the beautiful pastural calmness of Kings And Queens is quite a gear change where flute and clean-toned guitar sport a 60s-esque vibe. With Soft Machine’s wide harmonic vocabulary and a jazz-meets-prog authenticity shaped over many decades, Live At The Baked Potato is highly involving music indeed.
DAVID MACGREGOR LOOKING FOR A PLACE CALLED HOME World Jazz Records ✪✪✪✪
We’d describe this as solo guitar with jazzy, world music overtones. Scottish guitarist and composer David MacGregor currently resides in the Netherlands and has made it his mission to provide the world with an album that will “help listeners rediscover their roots” using “vintage sound and modern production”. Looking For A Place Called Home was inspired by David’s travels around the world and is currently available on vinyl only, such is his dedication to traditional practices. As a solo jazz guitar album it breaks the mould of plummy tone on show tunes to reveal self-penned compositions with genuine depth and weight - just check out the track Road To Floyd. In places it’s Metheneyesque with the occasional flash of Martin Taylor showing through, “David is a creative and unique voice on the guitar,” says recording engineer Andrew Tullock (Jamie Cullum and Robbie Williams) and we couldn’t agree more.