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Buddy Guy - Skin Deep
- By many musical standards, the blues is a pretty conservative genre. If you know an artist plays electric blues, you can predict their sound way better than if they played electric rock. On Skin Deep, blues legend Buddy Guy sticks to these basics: twelve-bar blues songs based around first, fourth, and fifth chords, with plenty of room for soloing. When you’re the best in the genre though, lack of overt musical experimentation is not really a knock. If this Buddy Guy album sounds a lot like other Buddy Guy albums, that only means he is still up to his unbeatable standards of playing.
And playing the guitar is something Guy can do better than most. His searing solos and licks are forceful and direct, wild and searing, emotional and angry. One furiously strummed note or high-speed run up the neck immediately proves he’s still the best in the business (sorry B.B.). Eric Clapton learned guitar by imitating Buddy, and Guy could still teach him a thing or two about passion. Unlike many blues musicians, the solos are risky and unpredictable, liable at any moment to come off the tracks. Guy says if he doesn’t hit any bad notes, it means he’s not trying hard enough, and that desire to push himself is obvious in every breakneck run.
Throughout Skin Deep, however, Guy’s voice competes with the guitar playing for attention. His singing is much like his playing, loud and frenetic, but with emotion dripping through every note. The gold standard for blues vocalists, he takes uninteresting lyrics about – what else – losing his woman, and fills them with personal meaning in his honeysuckle delivery. He yelps and wails, but just when you think he’s going to tear a vocal chord, he lapses into a smooth croon or a high falsetto. When he trades lines with Clapton on “Every Time I Sing the Blues,” you can tell Eric is trying his hardest to hold his own.
Such guests are what really make this album a stand-out though. While guest-heavy 2005 covers disc Bring ‘Em In just seemed overstuffed with personalities, all the performers here add more than a marquee name to the songs. Susan Tedeschi’s raspy soul nudges slow-builder “Too Many Tears” forward, and when Guy jams with Derek Trucks or Clapton you can picture the two grinning in the studio, seeing who can top the other as they trade licks. The Memphis Horns, however, steal the show on opening track “Best Damn Fool,” blaring away over the guitars, and you can’t help but wish they were on the whole album.
Having ditched the covers approach, Guy seems more confident than ever behind his own material, mostly written with songwriting partner and producer Tom Hambridge. The core band Guy employs is up to the challenge of backing the legend, letting him take the showy solos but contributing funky bass lines and jaunty piano riffs in the background that Hambridge wisely avoids burying. The perfect band to give Guy space to roam, their years of experience playing with him comes through in the casual ease with which they build textures and moods.
At 72 years old, Guy has more energy and soul than upstart wannabes half his age. Though his guitar playing steals the show as usual, this disc offer more than just a showy soloist. Using standard blues templates, Buddy Guy expresses defiant passion better than anyone else, and try though they might to imitate him, his peers have yet to catch up.
Reviewer: Ray Padgett
new
Reviewer's Rating: 8
Reader's Rating: 9.60
Reader's Votes: 5
Added: 22-Jul-2008
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