David a Jackson

"I can't fit into my skinny black jeans anymore," laments veteran blues rocker David Gogo on the appropriately titled, hard-driving, Stones-inflected, and likely autobiographical "Getting Old." Only in his early forties at the time of its 2011 release, he's obviously not letting fears of his advancing years slow or dull his attack, as his sixth release in a decade shows. Gogo isn't a particularly distinctive guitarist, but as this disc's title implies (Soul-Bender is also the name of the Fulltone guitar pedal he uses); he infuses plenty of soul with his bluesy rock & roll. To that end, a crackling version of Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel," played as a high-energy swamp rocker with female backing vocals and horns, seems like a Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes cover instead of a hit for the King of Pop. Gogo is in tough voice throughout, charging into the rugged "Slow It Down" and a slinky slide guitar-driven burner "Do You Know How It Feels?" with raw nerves exposed. As usual, he uncorks some terrific covers (in addition to Jackson's); stampeding his blues guitar leads on the Robin Trower/Procol Harum nugget "Whisky Train" and the Doors' underappreciated "The Changeling" with chops and imagination.

1982 will forever be known as the year that the punks got class – or at least when Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello, rivals for the title of Britain's reigning Angry Young Man – decided that they were not just rockers, but really songwriters in the Tin Pan Alley tradition. (Graham Parker, fellow angry Brit, sat this battle out, choosing to work with Aerosmith producer Jack Douglas instead.) Both had been genre-hopping prior to 1982, but Jackson's Night and Day and Costello's Imperial Bedroom announced to the world that both were "serious songwriters," standing far apart from the clamoring punkers and silly new wavers. In retrospect, the ambitions of these two 27-year-olds (both born in August 1954, just two weeks apart) seem a little grandiose, and if Imperial Bedroom didn't live up to its masterpiece marketing campaign (stalling at number 30 on the charts without generating a hit), it has garnered a stronger reputation than Night and Day, which was a much more popular album, climbing all the way to number four on the U.S. charts, thanks to the Top Ten single "Steppin' Out".