Independent (label)
25 October 2019 (released)
08 November 2019
Simple, beautiful, joyful and characterful – what a fabulous album!
An album of Blues stripped back to its most basic, mainly just Cinelli's voice and Del Toro's harmonica plus some delicious acoustic from Cinelli, all written recently by Marco or in collaboration with Del Toro and others and recorded in the one room with no more than one or two takes. However, rather than apply a hair shirt approach in recording with 30’s equipment they have recorded the whole thing with a clarity that the likes of Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson would happily have killed for.
So, setting aside the quality of the recording and moving on to the music, the songs are superb. Real Blues, very much in the style of the Delta greats. Marco Cinelli has a voice with a gruff edge to it but all the emotion that you would expect from the old Blues guys and Danny Del Toro plays harmonica as well as anyone I’ve heard in years.
All the markers of great Blues are in here: the songs reference common themes with real belief, there are fine melodies, the music is alternately joyful and touches on true hardship, most of all it is music that seems simple but takes great talent and belief to play properly.
It is anything but a retro-Blues copy album, no filler and no covers, ultimately it will appeal to any real Blues lover and I found myself
playing it all through half a dozen times for the sheer joy of the music.
