Monday 9 July 2012
I guess, in the end, it comes down to how you like your blues-rock. After ten studio albums (this is his eleventh), four live albums and three live DVDs there’s obviously a market for what Joe Bonamassa’s peddling out there, and it’s a market that was strong enough to vault this album as high as #2 on the U.K. Albums chart. That doesn’t mean as much as it did once upon a time, but still counts as a significant achievement indicating a fair degree of consumer recognition.
That U.K. chart action may also have something to do with the fact that Bonamassa cites the British and Irish re-interpreters rather than the Afro-American originators as his primary influences, so we’re talking Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Paul Kossoff, Peter Green and Rory Gallagher rather than Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and T-Bone Walker (though he does acknowledge B.B. King).
But while he boasts a fairly impressive curriculum vitae, including appearances with B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, Joe Cocker, Paul Rodgers, Gregg Allman, Steve Winwood, Warren Haynes, Eric Clapton, Derek Trucks, and Jack Bruce, Driving Towards the Daylight (which arrived on the doorstep as a freebie associated with a Rhythms magazine subscription) won’t be prompting too much credit card action on Hughesy’s part.
Heavy on covers rather than originals (an eight-three scoreline rather than the seven-four cited in some quarters since Somewhere Trouble Don't Go is a Buddy Miller rather than a Bonamassa composition) we’ve got some pretty standard blues-rock, tidy enough with plenty of punch in the production. Kevin Shirley has worked with the Black Crowes, and Aerosmith, so no surprises there and he’s done seven albums in six years with Bonamassa so he knows his stuff and his artist.