An outstanding cut. I cannot say enough good things about this musician and his band, Hogans Heros.I havn't been a country-rock music fan, but I can listen to this all day long….
Originally released on 12th March 1993, the album hit the No.1 spot in both the UK and Ireland and sold over 6 million copies worldwide. The four disc box set contains the album on the first CD and bonus material spread over three further discs. Of course all of those previous bonus tracks are included, but so too are unreleased early demos, a live performance from 31 July 1994 at the Féile Festival in Ireland and a series of radio sessions from 1992-1993. The box includes a poster and four postcards.
Title aside, what the Cranberries were doing wasn't that common at the time, at least in mainstream pop terms; grunge and G-funk had done their respective big splashes via Nirvana and Dr. Dre when Everybody came out first in the U.K. and then in America some months later. Lead guitarist Noel Hogan is in many ways the true center of the band at this point, co-writing all but three songs with O'Riordan and showing an amazing economy in his playing, and having longtime Smiths/Morrissey producer Stephen Street behind the boards meant that the right blend of projection and delicacy still held sway.
Albert Lee occupies an odd niche in music – British by birth and upbringing, he spent the mid-'60s as a top R&B guitarist, but in the 1970s became one of the top rockabilly guitarists in the world, and no slouch in country music either. In England he's a been household name, and in Nashville and Los Angeles he's been one of the most in-demand session guitarists there is; but outside of professional music circles in America, he's one of those vaguely recognizable names, and occasionally misidentified with his similar-sounding contemporary, ex-Ten Years After guitarist Alvin Lee (with whom he did share a berth once, in Jerry Lee Lewis's band on the latter's London Sessions album) – but where Alvin was a hero of Woodstock and a flashy guitarist, in the manner of British blues extroverts Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, Albert is much more likely to be found playing in the background, behind the Everly Brothers or alongside Eric Clapton.
An instant classic when it was released as a double LP in the U.K. in 1970 by Mike Vernon's legendary Blue Horizon Records, Swamp Blues isn't technically an Excello Records product, but all of the veteran blues artists included in the set have strong ties to the Louisiana label…..