Label: Mascot Label Group / Provogue Records
Release date: October 23, 2020
Production: Kevin Shirley
Genre: Blues Rock
Rating: 9.0/10
Joe Bonamassa and his 14th studio album. Yeah, we’re late. It came out back at the end of last October. Still. We have to cover it. So, Joe Bonamassa. A guy who’s constantly busy, strictly focused and committed to getting things done, a musician driven by incredible ambition. Passion and the very core of the pursuit of perfection. In everything he takes on. Yep. He’s simply a workaholic. Even more than 20 years after his studio debut came out. And the man is maturing. The new studio album is undeniable proof of that. Listening to “Royal Tea” can stir up catharsis and intrigue in the listener at the same time. “Royal Tea” is a thrilling achievement, and at the same time an album of original songs that comes close to a “covers” album, if you can still follow?
So on “Royal Tea”, Joe Bonamassa decided to dedicate his new record to the figures and legacy of the British white blues boom of the second half of the sixties, when bands like John Mayall Blues Breakers, Cream, Ten Years After and Fleetwood Mac gave the fusion of Mississippi Delta blues and rock’n’roll a whole new dimension. Bonamassa? An American? Yep. And that’s no surprise. Bonamassa himself admits he writes music under the influence of the discoveries of an era when, among others, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and Cream ruled the roost. So on the new album, too, Bonamassa delivers nothing groundbreaking for the evolution of rock, but what he does deliver is another ravenous musical adventure full of passionate heart that grabs you and carries you off. Precisely thanks to the sincerity and emotional immersion that have always run through this musician’s discography. No wonder Bonamassa picked the legendary Abbey Road Studio in London for the recording, and even less that he chose icons of the era he’s dedicating the album to as guests: Bernie Marsden, Jools Holland and Pete Brown. The album really is retro-nostalgic. He and Bernie Marsden wrote “Royal Tea” in a mere 14 days.
Bonamassa didn’t want to leave things to the whims of unfortunate circumstances that could in any way hamper his disciplined focus on reaching the goal. The goal? Authenticity. Purism in the pursuit of analog sound. That primal quality that has to capture the aura of sixties rock and blues. The studio is right, the crew of collaborators too, did we forget anything? You guessed it. The instruments. And the recording approach (‘in one take’). First try, live-performance style, which is no longer anything new for Bonamassa, except that this time he was that much more focused on getting a musical substance onto the record that would express, in full dose, an authentic reprint of the sixties, while at the same time paying a series of tributes to the musicians who shaped his playing and songwriting. Peter Green, Alvin Lee, Jeff Beck, and yeah, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page too…
Okay, let’s get to the material. Ten songs and ten carefully picked musical identities. Bonamassa hops brilliantly between approaches that give each song its own character, in a way trying to capture the essence of the sixties white blues boom in one piece. Starting with the opener When One Door Opens, which is by far the most artsy track on the album – the orchestral bit at the start is a surprise too, and then somewhere in the middle there’s a passage underpinned by a military drum march, all of it coming with a high yield of musicality. That last part is surprising. Bonamassa has always followed the search for melody with great finesse, even when playing the ‘blackest’ blues. Then there’s the extremely sensual, sentimental, classically seductive blues ballad Why Does It Take So Long To Say Goodbye, a story about two people splitting up, in which many will find themselves, especially those who became single again last year. Theatrical and hypnotic. An outstanding yield of melancholy and ravenous musicality, and there’s also that touch, the essential charm of the blues mojo that Bonamassa breathes. The song Lookout Man! could be described as Led Zeppelin vs Willie Dixon. A black blues mass that detonates in bristling yet gloomy phrasing, howling in semitones too; someone like Geezer Butler could easily hold down the bass lines in it, and yet the harmonica brings special delight, adding a distinct character to the song. There’s the ‘swinging, lucid’ and cheeky Lonely Boy, and the closing acoustic country number Savannah, which in a breezy, easygoing style wraps up this exceptionally bubbling and poisonously infectious album. A brilliant contrast comes from the reverb-backed R&B and funk “slap in the face” I Didn’t Think She Would Do It. Bonamassa skillfully dressed up the arrangements with horn & string arrangements, female backing vocals, the already mentioned harmonica, extra percussion, and of course plenty of acoustic guitar. He thought of everything. At the same time, on his 14th studio album he was surely also “learning” from the legends, led by Marsden. The song Royal Tea is another polished and compact Rhythm & Blues number, where Bonamassa would click perfectly with someone like Ian Siegal, especially if the track were given an acoustic treatment. That very song also proves, among other things, what an excellent singer Joe has grown into over the years.
We can say “Royal Tea” is very likely the most mature thing Joe Bonamassa has recorded and released to date. That goes for his guitar interpretation and playing too. The guy is often put in situations he hasn’t been in before, or has rarely tried. So at those moments he steps out of his comfort zone. As a result, he takes more approaches in his playing. Both in embellishing the lead motifs and in the solos. And? Although the well-known ‘fatness’ of the Gibson sound is here in abundance and Joe is once again pleasingly noisy like few blues rock revivalists of the new guard (that is, his generational peers), individual solutions in the songs come across as especially subtle and are played with particularly precise fine mechanics of ‘bending’ notes and tones. That kind of finesse is all the more welcome for livening up the mostly predictable songwriting template of “Royal Tea”. It’s precisely in this respect that “Royal Tea” radiates Joe Bonamassa’s great artistic maturity.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1 When One Door Opens (7:35)
2 Royal Tea (4:29)
3 Why Does It Take So Long To Say Goodbye (6:45)
4 Lookout Man! (5:31)
5 High Class Girl (4:54)
6 A Conversation With Alice (4:19)
7 I Didn’t Think She Would Do It (4:12)
8 Beyond The Silence (6:46)
9 Lonely Boy (4:06)
10 Savannah (4:38)
Lineup:
Joe Bonamassa – vocals, guitar, mandolin (on track no. 10)
Michael Rhodes – bass guitar
Reese Wynans – Hammond organ, Wurlitzer (on track no. 10)
Anton Fig – drums
Jeff Bova – percussion
Greg Morrow – percussion
Kevin Shirley – percussion, acoustic guitar
Juanita Tippins – backing vocals
Jade MacRae – backing vocals
Errol Litton – harmonica on track no. 4
Jools Holland – piano on track no. 9
Lee Thornburg – trumpet and horn arrangements on track no. 9
Paulie Cerra – alto sax on track no. 9
Ron Dziubla – baritone sax on track no. 9
Bernie Marsden – backing vocals on track no. 10
