Josh Boyd & The V.I.P. Band » News » Blues Magazine CD Review

All right, I’ll start with that moaning and grumpy lot, who will say that the booklet is not a real one (true, it’s only got a front and back with just a couple of water colors, one on each side and without one single comment…!), that there isn’t one single information on the back of the sleeve (just the titles of the 10 tracks played, and even then, not one single time against one of them!), but let’s move on, let’s go to what really matters… the music, the real one, the best of the best, the one that Josh injects in your veins, in your brain cells, in each hair that stands up when you listen to these tracks which make you drown in happiness, like in the magnificent rendering of ‘I Don’t Wanta’ Think About It’ or the extraordinary ‘My Guitar Gently Weeps’, which gives an incredibly amazing punch to this song from the quietest of the Beatles.

It’s true that Josh does not play the six-strings, he lives it, and he breathes it. That’s not hard, will say that moaning lot… when you’re born in a family dripping in music (and I know people who were born in that world, up to their necks in it, and they could not do anything with it!)… a family where you get your first guitar when you’re 3 before moving on to an electric one at 12 and performing your first concerts age 14. Josh willingly admits he has been influenced by those white bluesmen and ‘guitar heroes’, who have revisited the blues: Peter Green, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton. An influence which inspires the way Josh plays the guitar, gives it its fiery sound: the mark of these special players who can sway in one solo the whole of a stadium as well as the smallest of juke joints. After these long flights with ‘What’s Turning You On’, you’ll be won over by ‘You Make Me Feel So Damn Good’: a raw and explosive energy without any unnecessary gloss. Josh is mind-blowing, faithful to the spirit of the ‘mercenary’ he was when he used to accompany Rick Derringer, or Edgar and Johnny Winter.

A truly great album of blues-rock which you won’t be in a hurry to put away, right there between Clapton and Johnny Winter… you’ll want to listen to it again and again, and tell your neighbors to buy it because an album of this caliber deserves to be listened to at full volume, with all the windows wide open. And for all those grumpy ones who always have something to say, send the cavalry in with ‘Funky Popstand’ before putting them away with this superb rendering of ‘Down On The East Side’. It’s an absolutely, definitely great album of rock & blues.