Jazzhaus (label)
20 September 2019 (released)
09 July 2019
Danny Bryant produced this album himself, the first time in a 20 year career, and claims it is the album “he has been waiting his whole career to create”.
It certainly crackles with energy and passion, really bursting out of the speakers with a brio that very few artists manage to achieve and as well put together as any album I’ve heard from him in all that time.
Bryant says of the album title “Music is my release in the world, it’s my way of surviving, it’s my means of escape”.
Bryant is one of the hardest working of his generation of guitar-slingers and his style of incandescent Blues/Rock takes a lot from his mentor, Walter Trout, but really is all about his talent as a guitarist and a voice that can burn the paint off the walls while still carrying deep and heartfelt emotion.
He is a mean songwriter as well and this set suggests he can do the damage in the studio as well.
He rips it out of the gate right where he left off on his last album – the magnificent ‘Revelation’ – with burning guitar and hammerfall drums on ‘Tired Of Trying’. His singing is raw and passionate and the number just never lets up on the intensity – especially when he lays down a classic solo on his custom Strat at the peak.
‘Too Far Gone’ slows the pace with a heartfelt and exhausted vocal, introducing some piano, keys and horns but the star, again, is that wonderful guitar sound.
Then the title track picks the pace up again with a vaulting soundscape, faintly reminiscent of ‘All Along The Watchtower’, leaving you with a chill down your back at his passionate vocals.
The album shows that he can deliver rockers, ballads or even the occasional boogie but the surprise comes with ‘Skin And Bone’ as he sings simply over an acoustic guitar, a song to his late father that just brings tears to the eyes of anyone who has lost their best friend.
Overall, a magnificent album. He has used a great studio – Chapel Studios – for access to vintage recording gear and mixed the album in Nashville to get access to Eddie Spear but the bottom line is an album of terrific songs that carry his ‘brand’ of Blues/Rock.
