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When was the last time a young blues guitarist really blew your mind? Sure, there’s the Allman Brothers’ Derek Trucks, who comes at the form in a jam-band context. Jack White filters the blues through garage rock and punk; the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach through those and other pop styles; Ben Harper takes more of a folky singer-songwriter tack. But a genuine 21st-century bluesman, raised on the form in all its roughneck roadhouse glory but marked by the present day? That’s been as hard to find as a 21st-century clockmaker.
No longer. The first thing you hear on Gary Clark Jr.‘s four-song calling-card EP is a nasty, fat-assed electric-guitar tone, which the 27-year-old honed as a Texas teen playing clubs like Antone’s, Austin’s blues church. On the title track, Clark stretches that tone like taffy, swings it like a bullwhip, spits it out in bursts of distortion. It’s the blues, no doubt: Clark sings, “Ended up with the bottle/Taking shots, waiting on tomorrow/Trying to fill up what’s hollow,” over a snarling groove, confessing his intoxication with “bright lights, big city” like Jimmy Reed and Mick Jagger did before him. But the music is noise-soaked, psychedelic and shape-shifting, the guitar as much Kurt Cobain as Buddy Guy and Albert Collins, the drums smacking and slipping with hip-hop break-beat muscle. — Rolling Stone
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