Craft Recordings mark the tenth anniversary of The Record Company’s Grammy®-nominated debut with an expanded deluxe edition of Give It Back to You. The reissue pairs the original 10-track album featuring the chart-topping “Off the Ground,” alongside fan favorites “Rita Mae Young” and “On the Move” with a newly unearthed live document: the band’s legendary Living Room concert, recorded in bassist Alex Stiff’s Los Feliz home in 2013.
Heard today, Give It Back to You still lands with the same immediacy that helped launch the band a decade ago. The songs are built on tight interplay, gritty textures, and a lived-in blues-rock feel that favors momentum over excess polish. There’s a directness to the writing and performance that makes the album easy to return to-hooks…
Category: blues
First Light, Sean Taylor’s latest release, is like a collection of broadside ballads; song sheets with the ink still wet, hawked on street corners from the 16th century for some 300 years.
As immediate as news bulletins, the songs were meant to provide information and insights into the happenings of the day. Taylor is the modern equivalent of the songmonger, the travelling troubadour who writes to inform, inspire and challenge his audience. He has been at it for decades. First Light is his 15th album.
While Taylor may be the continuation of an old tradition, his music evinces a multitude of influences. He is a multi-instrumentalist who focuses primarily on piano and guitar. His music has elements of blues, jazz, folk and…
Joe Bonamassa releases B.B. King’s Blues Summit 100, A Landmark Tribute Album Featuring Dozens Of Music Stars To Celebrate The King Of Blues’ 100th Birthday. The result is a bespoke project, nine months in the making, with contributions from Buddy Guy, Keb’ Mo’, Slash, Shemekia Copeland, Marcus King, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Larkin Poe, Jimmie Vaughan, Warren Haynes, Dion, Aloe Blacc, Kirk Fletcher, and many others. Each artist was matched with material that felt personal – sometimes surprising – and all were given space to interpret King’s catalog through their own lens.
Bonamassa, who first opened for B.B. King at age 12, credits the blues titan with shaping his approach to music and life. “He mentored me,” says Bonamassa. “But I wasn’t the only one.
“We’re gonna light it, we’re gonna burn it down” this veteran roots rocking trio shouts in unison on the opening track of the band’s seventh offering. And that’s the blueprint for the next 30-plus minutes on ‘Barnburners!’.
The threesome emerges out of upstate New York, but you’d never know it from the deep swamp groove they wallow in with all the energy and integrity of a group that was eating polk salad greens for three meals a day. As if to acknowledge that, they cover Tony Joe White’s hit “Polk Salad Annie” (the woman whose tough qualities likely came from her mama who was working on a chain gang) with an authentic soul/blues straight out of the deep South. Lead singer/guitarist Jamison Passuite (the band’s founder and…
The pairing of West Side Chicago vocalist and harpist Omar Coleman and Brazilian guitarist Igor Prado is another great signing for the rapidly growing NOLA Blue label. Old, New, Funky & Blue is a testament to America’s original art form, increasingly becoming a universal language.
Prado, one of the most exciting guitarists on the international scene, familiar to U.S. blues fans through the defunct Delta Groove label, has continued to record albums since 2015’s Way Down South, but has received relatively little notice in the States. We last heard from Coleman in his pairing with guitarist Eddie Roberts on their 2024 Strange Times.
As the album title suggests, this collaboration extends beyond strictly 12-bar blues and…
Strolling down memory lane is something Marc Broussard enjoys. And it has proven more popular than even he likely imagined.
Since 2007s S.O.S. (Save Our Soul), the New Orleans-bred blue-eyed soul man has been sporadically releasing additional discs in an ongoing series revisiting some of his favorite songs, all between albums of his material.
The music covers a diverse span; from children’s ditties (2017s Vol. 3: A Lullaby Collection) to deep soul/blues (the Joe Bonamassa-enhanced Vol. 4: Blues for Your Soul). There was also a Christmas set, 2015s Magnolias and Mistletoe, not under the S.O.S. moniker but with a similar approach.
This side-road has been remarkably rewarding. The majority of Broussard’s most played…
Chicago-born and Springfield, Illinois-based blues and soul man Charles Tiner bursts out of your speaker with the kind of unrelenting power that immediately commands attention. It’s his overpowering organ and a potent voice to match. The aptly named Good Soul grabs tight and never lets go. The soloists in Tiner’s band, whether from four different lead guitarists, tenor saxophonist Theo Fisher, or harmonicist Chris Camp, match his fire too. This gospel-infused, roof-raising session will arouse even the most slumberous types. Yet there is little spiritual fare. Only the oft covered “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” qualifies. The rest of the tracks have their roots in the blues, both musically and topically, as Tiner sings mostly about survival, requited and unrequited love,…
There are some notable firsts for UK singer/songwriter/guitarist Laurence Jones’ On My Own. It’s not only his debut on the blues-rocking artist’s own, recently established label (Ron Records), but the only instance in his eight title catalog recorded entirely in solo acoustic mode. It’s also his most personal statement.
Most of these changes to the once fully plugged-in, some might say over-amped, and roaring attack Jones typically favored are integral to continuing his career dealing with Crohn’s disease. It’s an ailment he has suffered from for years and has become a spokesman for. According to his notes, the physical toll of leading a band and constant touring was not something he could continue due to the illness sapping his energy.
It’s been four-and-a-half years since hearing from Harlem-based vocalist and guitar slinger Solomon Hicks (no longer using “King” to precede his first name) on his album, Harlem. Now in his late twenties, Hicks’s sound continues to progress. When many of us were first introduced to him about a decade ago, we reveled in his clean, no pedals sound and pure, soulful Sam Cooke-like voice. He came across as an ‘old soul’ in a young man’s body, with a handsome smile, dressed to the nines. At that time, he was playing mostly covers, and many of us were projecting what he might sound like with original material.
That core of his sound and propensity to lean on covers remains intact, but his sound is now shrouded in electronica and a bit of gadgetry…
One Moment in Time: Live in the USA is the logical extension of the process of refinement that Robin Trower has undertaken with his studio albums of recent years. Running roughly 77 minutes in duration on compact disc and a double LP vinyl set, fourteen tracks taken from two shows on a 2025 American tour allow the British guitar hero to do justice to a solo career begun in 1971 upon his departure from Procol Harum.
It is utterly pragmatic that Trower collaborates with some of the same individuals with whom he’s fashioned such finely-honed expressions of contemporary blues like last year’s Come and Find Me and No More Worlds to Conquer from three years prior. The recordings were mixed for maximum detail by Sam Winfield…
Folk and blues legend Eric Bibb has garnered numerous Blues Music Awards Awards and Grammy nominations over the course of five decades and 34 albums. Regarded as a blues legend, his output is consistently strong.
One Mississippi is a direct follow-up to 2024’s In the Real World, rendering almost entirely original material with a similar backing cast. Once again, Bibb works with longtime musical director and producer, co-writer, and multi-instrumentalist Glen Scott, along with slide guitarist Robbie McIntosh and fiddler Esbjorn Hazelius. Select tracks draw in strings, background vocalists, and other flourishes. The tracks center around Bibb’s immaculate acoustic guitar and banjo playing, his vocals, and heartfelt lyrics.
Pastor Chris Congregation – West Virginia Snake Handler Revival “They Shall Take Up Serpents” (2025)
High in the mountains of West Virginia lies McDowell County. Formerly a hotspot for American coal mining, technological advancements and outsourced labour crept through Appalachia in the mid-twentieth century, leaving communities like McDowell destitute. From 1950 to 2020, the county saw its population fall by over 80%, and by 2015 it had the highest number of drug-related deaths of any county in the United States.
Alongside abandoned buildings and burnt-out cars, McDowell County is dense with churches. Typically Pentecostal, these have become a refuge for a community on the fringes of a zombified American dream clinging to bygone prosperity. One is The House of the Lord Jesus, also known as the last remaining snake-handling…
Tinsley Ellis has been with us for over four decades now, a career that encompassed some of the best songwriting any blues-rocker has ever put on record, mostly documented in his voluminous Alligator catalog. Shortly after the pandemic, Ellis inserted an acoustic segment into his live sets, playing the three different guitars found on Labor of Love, a follow-up to his full 2024 acoustic Naked Truth. Whether Ellis exhausted just about everything he could do in the blues-rock setting remains to be seen. Yet, he has clearly found his higher ground as an acoustic troubadour of the blues. His vocals shine in this format. One senses a newfound freedom and reinvigoration in his approach. Whether using slide or fingerpicking, Ellis is the genuine article, while…
…includes the original album and nine bonus tracks: seven previously unreleased tracks plus a 2025 remaster of “City of Refuge” and a 2025 mix of “Memphis Shakedown.”
The problem with flirting with old music styles in the digital speedway of the 21st century is the curse of revivalism, a tendency to reduce contemporary stresses and pressures to a perceived better time in the safe and distant past when things were simpler, clearer, and, well, more pure. But of course it’s always now — it’s never then or when — and musical revivalism can suffer from a kind of strictly enforced and ultimately empty artifice. A facsimile is still a facsimile — it can never, by definition, be the thing itself.
This is the dilemma for the Carolina Chocolate…
…Sir Van Morrison releases the 51st (give or take) solo album of a stellar career spanning more than 60 years across a wide range of musical genres; and, extraordinarily, he has become even more prolific in the last 10 years since turning 70, releasing more than an album a year, culminating in an album of predominantly blues covers sprinkled with a few new songs of his own.
Morrison’s musical career began in the late 50s as he learned to play guitar and saxophone as a teenager and featured in a variety of bands before forming Them in 1963, a quasi R’n’B group that released a string of singles, including rock standards such as ‘Gloria’ and ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’. He left to go solo in 1967 after monetary disputes arising from the band’s…
Bristol-born smoky-voiced singer-songwriter Elles Bailey has been steadily honing her craft for almost a decade now and, with four strong albums already behind her, Elles stature and fanbase are now at an all time high.
Elles last album Beneath The Neon Glow in 2024 reached number one in both the Jazz/Blues Albums Chart and iTunes Albums Chart as well as reaching number 12 in the UK Official Albums Chart. Elles went on to win Artist of the Year at the 2025 UK Blues Awards as well as Vocalist of the Year and Broadcaster Of The Year.
Now Elles starts 2026 with the release of her new album Can’t Take My Story Away which has a much different concept and approach than her previous albums.