Early in his career, Joe Bonamassa was positioned as yet another young (white) bluesman, in the tradition of Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Jonny Lang, the heir to the Stevie Ray Vaughan mantle from the \u201980s and the British blues players of the \u201960s and \u201970s before him. It was a title he had yet to earn, for although nobody questioned his technical skill, his reliance on covers and nascent songwriting positioned him only as an artist with promise.<\/p>\n
His third album You & Me <\/i>would start bringing in acclaim, but by that time Joe was already looking ahead to branching out his sound (the uneven Sloe Gin<\/i>); it wasn\u2019t until 2009 that everything he had done over the course of the decade coalesced into the excellent Ballad Of John Henry <\/i>and the accompanying Royal Albert Hall <\/i>concert, which was the man\u2019s first peak as a songwriter, not just a very good guitarist and incendiary live showman.<\/p>\n
With the light of what was to come, the early JB albums lack that sort of individual sound; they\u2019re good, of course, but they\u2019re nothing you haven\u2019t heard before. So It\u2019s Like That <\/i>falls into this same mix, whereupon the songs are the same sort of blues\/rock you can hear on any number of similar Southern rock albums, or a good live bar band on a Saturday night. It\u2019s good music that is played well\u2026 but it\u2019s nothing you haven\u2019t heard. <\/p>\n
To me\u2014as nearly the sole reviewer of JB on these Vault pages\u2014JB is at his best when he\u2019s in dramatic storytelling mode and\/or guitar hero mode. There\u2019s little of that on display here. The title track and \u201cLie #1\u201d chug along nicely but generically while the acoustic \u201cNever Say Goodbye\u201d and the Elvis cover \u201cWaiting For Me\u201d don\u2019t really leave much of an impression. The songs frequently call other artists to mind; you will hear some Skynyrd there, some Gov\u2019t Mule or Drive-By Truckers there, some SRV in spots, and so forth, but it\u2019s not individual or unique, just another good blues-rock album. <\/p>\n
But this is JB, of course, so there are some great moments here, especially the pulse-racing \u201cUnder The Radar,\u201d the solo on \u201cSick In Love\u201d and the 10-minute \u201cPain And Sorrow,\u201d in which the band loosens up, jams a bit, adding an extra step in the drums above and beyond a normal beat that jolts the song to life under Joe\u2019s myriad guitar textures. Rather than just a showy solo, he lets the notes breathe, sometimes pausing before the next one, a sort of David Gilmour approach (Billy Corgan would do something similar on \u201cUnited States\u201d when Smashing Pumpkins reformed in 2007). It was the first time that JB (on record, anyway) started to show he was more than just another generic white bluesman who loved classic rock, and is worth seeking out as the start of the throughline that connects this to John Henry <\/i>to Blues Of Desperation<\/i>. Shame the same can\u2019t be said for the rest of the album.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":34738,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[7758],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-46595","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-joe-bonamassa","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46595"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}