Robert Cray: Time Will Tell

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * *)

After the first flush of success, Cray was rather too easily dismissed as a bluesman for the middle classes. Well, you should never judge artists by their audience and although there was some truth in that assessment it failed to account for Cray's position in blues history.

He was among the few who made this one-time rural, then urban, art into a valid suburban music. While it might sound authentic to sing of hard times down home (and good on Corey Harris for doing it so convincingly) Cray's agenda lay elsewhere, in the temptations and difficulties of the modern world.

Latterly he has moved towards the soulful end of the blues, and on this sound, if sometimes unspectacular, outing he embarks on soul narratives (the sitar-flavoured and string-infused romance of the euthanasia ballad Up in the Sky), ruminations on the power of love (I Didn't Know), gets into country gospel on Survivor, and punctuates the material with nods towards the Memphis soul and organ grooves (Your Pal, What You Need, Spare Some Love?).

The subject matters are as wide as in any glossy magazine (plus two anti-war songs, Survivor and Distant Shore) and the guitar solos have been cut to almost nothing here, the notable exception being the final track Time Makes Two which is his fully realised bridge between blues and soul.

It is telling his stab at hard blues Back Door Slam ("I was born in the back seat of a travelling hurricane, I came up in the back streets of the city with no name") is the least convincing thing here. Cray sounds more persuasive on the ballad Lotta Lovin', when he offers to pour some wine, then unveils a seductive, subtle guitar passage which swings with understated sophistication. It may be suburban blues, but it ain't no bad thing.

Label: Sanctuary/ Elite