True Fire Guitar

Recorded on their first concert tour, this is the first release by Dave Bainbridge's new band Celestial Fire. Featuring a mix of IONA music (some rarely played live, such as 'Brendan's Voyage/Return'), music from Dave's solo albums and even a Yes cover or two, this recording shows the astonishing breadth of talent and stunning musical sensitivity in this new line up…

Outstanding 5th studio disc by this awesome blues/rock guitar axeslinger from Indiana. Featuring 12 tracks of top-shelf, world-class, powerful, dynamic, ass-kickin', blues-based guitar rock excellence that lands down hard between a rock and a blues place. Combining strong songs and amazing musicianship, complete with an excellent sonic production, it all adds up to create an incredible, sophisticated, memorable blues/rock guitar experience. Jay Jesse Johnson is a true modern day guitar hero whose bad-ass six string playing skills are through the jam:house roof. Combining amazing technique with feel, killer tones to die for and drawing from excellent vintage musical influences/inspirations, Triple J has created his own stand-out voice on the instrument.

I wonder what fans who expected a followup just as hard-rocking as Reckless thought of Into The Fire. There are some engaging rocking songs and Keith Scott is still on board, but without the power chops that made Reckless such a hit. This is a more mellowed work, with some sobering topics that probably wouldn't have most music buyers scrambling to get this album…

Mississippi born and raised, Elmore James learned his trade in the Delta in the 1930s, emerging in the early 1950s as the godfather of modern electric guitar, and no guitarist who ever plugged an instrument into an amp is free of his influence. Not only did he create the template for electric slide players everywhere, he also reworked his amps until they delivered a raw, overdriven sound that became endemic in pop and rock music a decade later, and no punk band ever sounded more ragged or passionate than Elmore James in full stride. James recorded for some dozen labels during his short recording career (he died in 1963 of a heart attack at the age of 45), and he is one of those rare artists whose recorded output was seamless from the first to the last…

The third-and-final album from the Baker Gurvitz Army doesn't quite live up to the high standards reached on the outfit's previous efforts, but it's still an enjoyable work…