Albert Castiglia

This is Albert Castiglia’s seventh album and it promises to be the best yet.

He has no soft edges to his music. It is all Blues/rock with punch, power and raw tones but it is also exhilarating, funky and really not something to be passed over.

From the Lizzy-like drum riff that opens ‘Hoodoo On Me’ and those dark vocals (New York via Florida and on to Louisiana) he throws everything at the wall and it all sticks.

The band is a power-trio with Brian Menendez on drums and Jimmy Pritchard on bass. There is no room for fat in that kind of outfit and the music is lean and puts all the focus on Castiglia but he is a strong enough singer and guitarist for it to work. Mike Zito produced his last album ‘Big Dog’ so he was retained for this album and he brings a great sense of deepening the music so that at any moment, even when Castiglia is off on a screaming guitar solo you can listen into the back and here some superb fat and funky bass lines holding the melody together.

He does temper his power with a straight-up Blues song in ‘Unhappy House Of Blues’ (co-written with Cyrille Neville) with Johnny Sansome howling harmonica, but even then he has a hard edge to his music and he closes the album with an acoustic number, ‘You Got Me To That Place’.

There are a few tracks that are destined to be long term favourites: ‘Quit Your Bitchinq’ is a slow Blues that just sucks you in while ‘Three Legged Dog’ has all the punch and funk you could with for.

Castiglia seems to have found his natural home in Zito’s Dockside Studios and with a rhythm section that he can totally trust and play with.
A real cracker