Pat Donohue 2011 Nobody's Fault

2004 remastered reissue of 1976 debut album features nine tracks & includes original artwork with updated sleeve notes. When Pat Travers exploded onto the scene in 1976, people sat up and took notice. This young Canadian played guitar with a passion and an intensity that took everybody by surprise. This, his debut album, is one of the great debut albums of the period. Tracks like 'Makes No Difference' and 'Medley Parts 1 & 2' are classic slices of 70's hard rock. There was, however, much more to Pat Travers than a Marshall stack and a Fender Telecaster screaming for mercy. Pat's roots lay in the blues, and it's that raw earthiness that runs through the music on this CD. As great as this undoubtedly was, though, better was to come.

Volume Two of Travers Classics Including Life in London, it Ain't What it Seems, Makin' Magic(Live), Heat in the Street(Live), and Is This Love. With his hard, edgy tone, rough and rowdy vocals, and barroom boogie aesthetic, Canadian singer, guitarist, and keyboardist Pat Travers is a fine example of a Canadian bluesy hard rock act. He arrived during the '70s heyday of hard blues-rocking guitar heroes. His eight-album run for Polydor – from his eponymous 1976 debut through 1984's Hot Shot – netted seven Top 200 chart placements and two Top 40 singles, including the party anthem classic "Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights)." Subsequently, he placed four singles in the Hot 100, and two more in the upper rungs of the Mainstream Rock Songs charts. Travers is equally adept at playing funk, jazz, and prog. He has toured almost annually for more than 40 years, playing more than 150 dates per year.

Unlike almost any other modern musician, Pat Metheny remains uniquely unpredictable. A new Metheny record could be almost anything as the only musician to have won twelve of his twenty Grammy awards in twelve different categories. His recent recording Road To The Sun caused a sensation in the classical music world for its intricate and emotionally satisfying chamber music compositions. At the same time, its immediate predecessor From This Place was Downbeat magazine’s Jazz Record of the Year as an expansive and timeless large-scale work.

Mathias Eick follows up his melodically charged leader debut, 2008’s The Door, with something delectable. This time he fronts an expanded, smoother band that includes saxophonist Tore Brunborg within a nest of Scandinavian talent. Ever at their center is Eick, whose threefold role as composer, performer, and arranger takes on fuller idiomatic body.
Skala shares key aspects with its predecessor. It is another set of eight originals, which too can be divided into three acts of two, three, and three scenes, respectively. Act I likewise opens with the title track and, like its earlier counterpart, only seems to grow more translucent as instruments are added. Yet the similarities end there, for the music is something else entirely. Here is a musician who not only has listened deeply to others on the path to enriching his compositional breadth…

Overall, this is not quite in the top echelon but is a solid entry in the increasingly crowded sub-genre of greasy, white-hipster, roadhouse blues - a retro-blend of Texas and Chicago blues sensibilities with dirty-toned guitar, danceable jump and shuffle rhythms, and soul-inflected vocals. The band is a guitar-bass-drums trio, plus singer Jimmy Morello (who brings to mind Kim Wilson and Sugar Ray Norcia, sans harp). Boyack displays flashes of wit on guitar. Producer Ron Levy thickens the sound with his own Hammond B-3, although mixed very much in the background, and with horns on a few cuts. The tunes are all originals, a majority written or co-written by Morello (who has since left the band). Best cuts are the upbeat "Sugar," with its catchy "wo-wo-wo-wo" hook; the minor key "I Know It's Over"; and the Albert King-style "Cleanin' Out My Closet."

20-time Grammy winner Pat Metheny returns with his most personal record to date - Dream Box.