The perennial Southern swamp-rocker and the Louisiana man who defined the genre (although John Fogerty of Creedence got there around the same time, albeit from San Francisco), doesn't change his winning formula here.
It's still low-growl'n'mumble vocals, rolling grooves and razor-sharp guitar on these nine tracks looking to his own life for source material. Which means a rich vein of songs about the family's 40-acre, seven-child cotton plantation in the 1940s and early 50s (9 Foot Sack), the perils of the swampland (the brooding Alligator Mississippi) and more recently being washed out of his riverside home near Nashville (the spare and elemental seven-plus minutes of The Flood).
When he sings of a storm comin' you can feel the air thicken and the Devil darkening the sky.
Newbies to TJW - there might be some - will think this of average interest, old fans will appreciate the consistently menacing tone in the live-to-tape songs and rate this much higher. Over a 45-year recording career, 70-year old White has hardly moved far from the original design of steamy voodoo blues, roots country-folk seeped in Lightnin' Hopkins and veiled menace.
And that's good news.
