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THE PHILADELPHIA INO BUDDY GUY ‘RHYTHM BLUES’ n “I Go By Feel,” Buddy Guy uses the title phrase to explain, among other things, his approach to playing the blues. But even the greats, including Guy, can use help along the way in melding inspiration with craft and enhancing the artist’s gifts. And Guy gets that from producer drummer-writer Tom Hambridge. The result is a focused, hard-hitting two-CD set of 21 tracks that clocks in at just over 80 minutes total. The 77-year-old Guy gets plenty of chanc es to flash his prodigious guitar chops, but he does so in the context of taut, well-structured songs that don’t restrict feel as they range from driving straight blues to swag gering roadhouse RB and ballads brooding and soul-tinged. Guests are on hand, including Kid Rock, Keith Urban and Steven Tyler, but they just complement the main attraction, whom Hambridge supplies with songs that at times reso nate with references to the singer's own life. And with “Meet Me in Chicago,” there is also a welcome alternative to the well-worn Windy City anthem “Sweet Home Chicago.” SAM PHILLIPS PUSH ANY BUTTON’ I though she had been putting out albums since the early ’80s, Sam Phillips retreated from the corpo rate music business after 2008's “Don’t Do Any thing,” choosing instead to make songs available via a private subscrip tion program she called Long Play and to serve as music director for Amy Sherman-Palladino’s TV series “Bunheads,” as she had for “Gilmore Girls.” In 2011, she released a sampler of a dozen of the 44 Long Play songs, but the self-released “Push Any Button” is her first publicly available new album in five years. Clocking in at 29 min utes, it’s a compact set of 10 fun, barbed, clatter ing songs that integrate upbeat rockabilly gui tars and sweet country politan strings into the artful torch-song style she has mined since 2001's “Fan Dance.” “When I’m Alone” and “You Won’t Know” rock more than anything she’s done since her baroque pop period in the ’90s and ballads such as “No Time Like Now” and “Going” rank with her best. THE CIVIL WARS ‘THE CIVIL WARS’ by Williams and John Paul White are the two artists who make up The Civil Wars, whose name is also on the album at hand. Their first album, “Barton Hollow,” featured songs of wrong and long ing, Mobius-strip harmo nies, and tales of enchant ment and dissolution. During a tour later, they split, issuing a state ment about “internal dis cord and irreconcilable differences of ambition.” Somehow, here they are again, in an album pro duced by eclectic vision ary Charlie Peacock, with Rick Rubin on the rustic romancer “I Had Me a Girl.” Williams’ pure, dul cet tones are more pres ent than White's. Unlike “Barton Hol low,” the pair loses some intimacy to bolder arrangements and instru mentation (as in the back ing blues of “Oh Henry”). What “The Civil Wars” loses in sonic proximity, however, it gains in lyri cal strength. Whether the duo mem bers work better together or apart, “The Civil Wars” is heartbreaking stuff. hes
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Barstow Desert Dispatch
Barstow, California, US
Fri, Aug 16, 2013
Page 21
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USA 22 Jun 2026
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