CD Reviews

The Derek Trucks Band

Songlines | Columbia

By TED DROZDOWSKI | March 21, 2006

Derek Trucks regains the eclectic mastery of his early recordings with the dozen tunes here on his group’s first full-length studio album in four years. His versatile slide guitar — cutting and reedy on the traditional blues “Crow Jane,” thick and melismatic covering quawwali spiritual singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “Sahib Teri Bandi/Maki Madni” — is the CD’s main voice, always buoyant, melodic, and flexible. But Songlines also welcomes singer Mike Mattison to the group, and he’s a deft foil, matching his falsetto pitch to Trucks’s keening lines in “Crow Jane” and crooning Toots Hibbert’s “Sailing On.” Mattison also negotiates a funked-up version of O.V. Wright’s “I’d Rather Be Blind, Crippled and Crazy” with an edgy solo from Trucks that begins on acoustic dobro and shifts to his trademark Gibson SG electric. The guitarist’s hardcore fans will notice some subtle changes in his clean and beefy tone, thanks mostly to some judicious use of digital delay to thicken its texture. This album also sounds more spontaneous than his last few studio discs, with some densely woven ensemble playing on numbers like the love song “All I Do.” In fact, Songlines is also more exciting than anything the Allman Brothers, Trucks’s main gig, have done in years.

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