19 Miles High (label)
10 February 2010 (released)
16 May 2010
This album has been around for a while but it has become so much a part of my regular playlist that I haven’t done the review before now and that is my bad because this is one of the albums of the year and everyone should hear about it.
Tim King is a superb guitarist and he has had a massive career as a sessioneer with a slew of Britiush indie bands and the likes of Alice Cooper and Nigel Kennedy but he is also a Blues guitarist with a really strong feel for the music he loves and a helluvaway with a rock song.
Even though his playing has touches of Hendrix, Robin Trower or Duane Allman he has his own voice and a classic style without clichés.
He soloes like a demon and he plays slow Blues with feeling and a great sense of the epic – ‘Vigilante Man’ is destined to be one of the classics in years to come – but he can also play it with deep emotion as on ‘Now I Know’ where he plays with incredible intensity and passion and the sense of desperation that he brings out in ‘Loneliness Makes Sense Sometimes’ is painfully raw but brilliantly portrayed.
He is one of those rare beasts who can play slow and sparse without sounding as though he is struggling to work out what to do next but when he hits the ‘rocker’ button as he does on ‘The Devil Waits For No Man’ he blisters the ears with the power and screaming heights of his playing.
He packs more music into the 33 minutes of this album than most of his contemporaries do in an hour; seek it out and enjoy.
