Edgar Winter

Sadly, Edgar Winter doesn’t have the same instant recognition, over here, as his brother Johnny but he has been around since the seventies and there are very few rockers who can best him in the pre-poodle hair and lycra genre. This guy has rock in his veins and a voice that could cut through granite.

He has also cut this back to the basics and it rocks like a beast.

The core band is Winter on vocals, keyboards and sax, Doug Rappaport on guitar (who has shared his time with Winter and Rick Derringer over the last dozen years), Koko Powell on bass and Jason Carpenter plus Jimmy Paxon on drums – all well travelled and highly experienced musicians – and add a cameo from Slash on the title track, Clint Black playing harp and Johnny Winter playing lead and solo on one track and you have something fine.

For my money the bands of the seventies such as Mountain, Black Oak Arkansas, Grand Funk Railroad – the excess years – made some of the most free and exciting rock music ever. There were no pretensions to intellectual worthiness and equally no holding back either in the studio or onstage and this album is in line with those mighty bands.

Winter’s gravelly Texan drawl, raising to a scream at times is an awesome thing and perfectly suited to the 11 tracks here.
The music varies between the balls out rockers such as the title track to the funky and New Orleans tinged ‘Texas Tornado’ - where Edgar gets to show off his sax skills – or the sweet and heartfelt ‘The Closer I Get’ which is melodic and intense and shows another side of his vocals. ‘Eye On You’ is a swaggering rock/funk and the best tracks are probably the rockers with ‘Rockin’ The Blues’ (featuring Johnny) and ‘The Power of Positive Drinking’ with some great harp from Clint Black is damn fine.

Don’t look for revelatory playing or complex polyrhythms – this is a rock album and all the better for its honesty.