1. Ball Peen Hammer
2. One Of These Days
3. Seagull
4. Dirt In My Pocket
5. Sloe Gin
6. Another Kind Of Love
7. Around The Bend
8. Black Night
9. Jelly Roll
10. Richmond
11. India
Total time: 48:52
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Sloe Gin
Joe Bonamassa
J&R Adventures
There’s an acoustic guitar on the cover of Bonamassa’s new album for good reason: The quotient for that instrument is way up from last year’s “You & Me.” “Gin” originally was planned to be completely sans electric, but once repeat producer-mixer Kevin “Caveman” Shirley got in the studio, he decided to do more with it. The end result is another stellar set of songs – some acoustic, others electric and many acoustic-electric – in which Bonamassa loses his blues-rock shredder image.
The title track is a Michael Kamen-Bob Ezrin composition written for Tim Curry’s 1978 album, “Read My Lips,” and features something rarely heard in blues these days: strings (actually electronic keyboardist Jeff Bova, doing business as the Bovaland Symphonic Orchestra). The song also is a testament to how much Bonamassa has benefited over the last three albums from voice coaching; Shirley even says in a Modern Guitars interview that until he produced “You & Me,” he didn’t think the singing was on a par with the playing, “which is kind of why I brought (Healing Sixes’ Doug Henthorn) in on (that album’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s) ‘Tea for One.’”
Bonamassa’s cover of Chris Whitley’s “Ball Peen Hammer” also makes use of Bova’s faux orchestra, in a Middle Eastern, Zeppelin kind of way. It’s even got that Bonham sound, but Jason isn’t the drummer again for this album – Anton Fig is. The influence probably comes from Shirley, who mixed 2003’s great-sounding Zep live archive release, “How the West Was Won.”
The other five covers are Alvin Lee and Ten Years After’s “One of These Days,” Bad Company’s “Seagull,” John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers’ “Another Kind of Love,” Charles Brown’s “Black Night” and John Martyn’s “Jelly Roll.” But make no mistake – the four original compositions are no slouchers, especially “Dirt in My Pocket,” featuring hard-driving electric slide juxtaposed with acoustic guitar and subtle tablas; and the sitar-inspired instrumental, “India.”
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