Electric Guitar Rock

Paul Gilbert's newest album features 12 new original songs, all with Paul's most expressive, and inspired guitar playing to date! Behold Electric Guitar was produced by legendary producer and engineer John Cuniberti (Joe Satriani) and features Roland Guerin on bass, Asher Fulero on keyboards and Bill Ray, Reinhardt Melz and Brian Foxworth on drums. Although the album is mostly instrumental, Paul starts writing each song by writing the lyrics, and then transform those lyrics to melodies on the guitar. Paul's unused lyrics not only gave him a creative spark for the music but also yielded some interesting song titles. "Sir You Need to Calm Down," "I Own a Building," "Let That Battery Die," and "A Snake Just Bit My Toe" can certainly pique the curiosity of the listener. The exception to Paul's instrumental guitar theme is his poem, "A Herd of Turtles." Paul opted for his best Liverpudlian accent to recite his poem of hope, and inserted some ferocious funk riffs for musical contrast in between.

Hank Marvin, mostly playing a Favino acoustic guitar (and, occasionally, the "Hank Marvin"-model Fender Stratocaster), turns in some delightful work on this 58-minute CD, supported by players including Ben Marvin on guitar, Ray Martinez on bass, Gary Taylor on rhythm guitar, and Ric Eastman on drums. The music ranges across the decades from the 1950s to the 1970s – the virtuosity is beyond question and the arrangements on familiar fare such as "Sunny Afternoon," "American Pie," "Ticket to Ride" and "Eleanor Rigby" bring out some unexpected attributes to the songs, as well – only "Your Song" does what one would expect in its arrangement, and that tune is so pretty that one would never want to deviate too far from the basics on it. Some of the original tunes are less than memorable melodically, but the playing is always interesting enough to hold the listener, and one of them, "A Tall-A Tall Dark Stranger" could have made a good single two or three decades ago, with its rippling double-lead guitar parts.

Once again working with producer/songwriter Tom Hambridge – the bluesman's main collaborator since 2008's Skin Deep – Buddy Guy serves up a straight-ahead platter with Born to Play Guitar, his 28th studio album. Many of Guy's latter-day records loosely follow a theme, but Born to Play Guitar is pretty direct: just a collection of songs designed to showcase Buddy's oversized Stratocaster. Which isn't to say there's either a lack of variety or pro forma songwriting here. Hambridge cleverly colors Born to Play Guitar with a few bold, unexpected flourishes: the sweeps of sweet strings that accentuate "(Baby) You've Got What It Takes," a duet with Joss Stone that lightly recalls Etta James' Chess Records work; the big, blaring horns of "Thick Like Mississippi Mud" that moves that track out of the Delta and into an urban setting; the acoustic "Come Back Muddy" which performs that trick in reverse, pushing Chicago blues back down south.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream are among the first groups that come to mind when discussing classic power trios. Ireland's Taste, led by guitarist Rory Gallagher, were also there at the beginning. They were raw, rocked hard, and were more devoted to the blues. Gallagher kept the trio format long after going solo, and became a fine songwriter as well. Crow Black Chicken are his countrymen. Christy O'Hanlon (vocals, guitar), Stephen McGrath (bass), and Gev Barrett (drums, backing vocals) have soaked up his and his contemporaries' influences, as well other loud and proud trios: ZZ Top, Mountain, Gov't Mule, etc. Electric Soup is their debut long-player. It's an excellent showcase for CBC's stunning playing and excellent songwriting – the latter is something many of their contemporaries never learned. These are not mere riff-heavy stoner rock jams, but songs. While they keep things basic, CBC understand the place of melody and dynamics; they've soaked up their share of folk and country in addition to blues and guitar rock.

Although ELO quickly became Jeff Lynne's baby, it was launched as a collaboration between Lynne and his bandmates in the Move, multi-instrumentalist Roy Wood, and drummer Bev Bevan. Indeed, the label on ELO's first album reads "Move Enterprises Ltd. presents the services of the Electric Light Orchestra," and most histories claim that the initial idea for the spin-off group combining rock and classical music was Wood's, not Lynne's. Wood and Lynne split the songwriting duties on Electric Light Orchestra, much as they did on late-period Move albums, but it seems like their visions of what ELO was were widely divergent. Wood's songs are clearly more classically influenced, with the string and horn sections driving the songs rather than merely coloring them, as they do on Lynne's tunes.