Bad For You Baby

Gary Moore is a name most people know mainly from the second half of the ’80s and the early ’90s, when the former Thin Lizzy/Colosseum II troubadour was successfully building on the recognition of his solo career. After a triumphant stint in AOR waters, the arrival of the ’90s saw the guitarist drifting more and more often toward blues, which stayed the backbone of his musical expression well into the new millennium. The Gary Moore concept stays unchanged as the blues-rock odyssey rolls on with Bad For You Baby: a fairly predictable crossing of the basic building blocks of the blues with hard-rocking moves, which in a long-forgotten time and place laid golden eggs for the hot-headed Irish guitarist. Despite the clichéd title, though, the album hides more vitality than you’d dare to expect. There are honest-to-goodness bouquets’ worth of goodies here. Right out of the gate, Moore storms through the title track on the wings of that trademark Muddy Waters rhythmic intensity, the slightly cheekier Down the Line will quickly bring back memories of the golden days of Texas Strut, and the pack of infamous riffs sprinkled with bits of funky rhythm that goes by the name Umbrella Man proves more than welcome too.

From there Moore tickles us with some very well-judged covers of assorted blues standards, which after the first listen quickly chase away the memory of the guitarist’s sins of the past, when with his all-too-often soulless maneuvering on Close As You Get he recklessly squandered a good chunk of his credit as a top-tier blues interpreter among blues fans. By far the most goosebumps come from I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know, Al Kooper style, which besides sensationally restrained vocals impresses with extremely subtle guitar playing. Here once again you can see the guitarist’s debt to the sound of the great Peter Green, seeking a path to the heart through a harmony that’s substantial yet drenched in melancholy. Mojo Boogie, the slide carousel by fallen blues hero J. B. Lenoir, offers plenty of emotional soul-baring, and with it Moore crowns another of his rather unexpected moves. Waters’ Someday Baby and Walkin’ Thru the Park only add fuel to the fire of emotional tension.

Although Bad For You Baby is for the most part a manifestation of sharp blues-rock rhetoric, Moore evidently isn’t afraid to peek out of his safe haven, even crafting more ear-friendly atmospheres, like the album’s gem Holding on, which even packs in some pretty solid melodics in the style of Robert Cray. Did You Ever Feel Lonely? and Preacher Man Blues win you over with fiery retro aromas, and the latter, girded with the stinging wail of a harmonica, smells downright mystical, like an early Little Walter after a painful liposuction procedure. Shame that the otherwise highly enjoyable blues-rock journey gets unintentionally spoiled at the end by Trouble Ain’t Far Behind, yet another of Gary’s creations that (again) reminds far too much of Need Your Love So Bad by Green’s Fleetwood Mac. Still, with Bad For You Baby Moore has managed, for the first time in a long while, to create an enviable document that will probably find allies both among fans of the shameless sound of Chicago blues and among worshippers of undisputed guitar virtuosity.