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