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We kick off with the title track an instrumental named after Sue’s trademark pink paisley ’69
Fender Tele (now showing signs of wear!). It is a slice of single-string sorcery! ‘Dallas Man’ is a
Foley original that celebrates all the great Texas guitar players from Blind Lemon Jefferson to
Jimmie Vaughan, with the latter adding his guitar to Sue’s own rocking song ‘Hurricane Girl’.
Angela Strehli’s ‘Say It's Not So’ is a low down blues that sounds more West Side Chicago than
West Texas, while ‘Southern Men’ is swampy and reverb-heavy (it’s a sex-changed version of Big
Walter Horton’s ‘Southern Woman’). ‘Boogie Real Low’ is a driving cover of the Frankie Lee Sims
jump blues but we change pace completely for Lillie Mae Donley’s ‘Think it Over’ a tender, melodic
blues ballad.
This record really showcases Sue’s guitar playing, not just on the instrumentals - Sue’s own ‘Pinky’
and also Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown’s string-shredding ‘Okie Dokie Stomp’ — but also the
majority of the tracks here are just guitar, bass and drums with Sue’s guitar doing all the heavy
lifting. Her vocals aren’t what you’d normally associate with a female blues vocalist being quite
high-register and ‘little-girly’ but they really cut through despite not being right at the front of the
mix. This is a really good record but I’m afraid that for me the rather limited instrumentation and
choice of material meant that I didn’t enjoy it as much as the wonderful ‘Ice Queen’.
Graham Harrison
David Gogo—Silver Cup—Digital release
David Gogo teamed up with fellow Canadian musician Steve
Marriner to record this album (his sixteenth) in his own house,
it's a basic mainly acoustic record that utilises Marriner's
production techniques learned during the lockdown. Opener
'Never Gonna Change' sets the style - interlocking rhythm and
slide guitars played on vintage instruments, including an old
adapted player piano, plus howled vocals. There's a fairly
ordinary version of Dylan’s 'It Takes a Lot to Laugh (It Takes a
Train to Cry)' but elsewhere it's nine original songs like the title
track which references Gogo's own family history and features
some nice fiddle.
I really liked 'Blues for Dollface' a rocking blues featuring Marriner's wonderful blues harp; 'Old
Enough to Know Better' is a nice blues with amusing lyrics that we can all relate to; '641/2' is a
melodic instrumental (more nice harp) and the closing 'Top Shelf' has a different meaning to the
phrase than that used in Britain. I really liked some of the songs here but thought that there
weren't enough of them and the overall sound was a bit samey.
Graham Harrison
Vintage Trouble—Juke Joint Gems—Digital release
Following the success of their debut album ‘The Bomb Shelter
Sessions’ for me they have never really followed it up with
anything that had the same raw energy and the exciting mix of
rock, blues and soul. However, apparently they started to record
live favourites immediately after this initial release but these
were never actually released - until now!
'The World’s Got To Take A Turnaround' gets us off to a good
bluesy start and '24-7-365 Satisfaction Man' is one of their
melodic soul ballads from the same mould as the sublime 'Not