Album: Kelly Joe Phelps

Slingshot Professionals, Rykodisc

The past decade has witnessed the rise of an entire generation of new acoustic bluesmen building in various ways on the well-worn foundations of Skip James, Charley Patton and Robert Johnson. Most have the masters' moves down pat, although there issomething of the journeyman about their slim ambitions, which generally go no further than replicating or updating an antique form.

Kelly Joe Phelps is something else entirely, the only one of them who, having long since mastered the technical aspects of his trade, now seeks to locate the spirit of the old rural blues among the chaos and bitterness of modern life. "These days my curiosity and passion are piqued by words," he claims. "The music they themselves make... how to build a song like a painter's picture, with all its shadow and mystery and light." His curiosity has led him into intriguing territory, shot through with striking imagery (such as the opening couplet "This makes as much sense as a frog on a chain/ A leper knocking trees down with his fist").

Entire lives slip by in a single line – "Used to be a girl then a woman then nothing" – while an emotional co-dependency keeps together the odd couple in "Not So Far to Go": sad Ginger, who "dyes her hair red to fit her name", and Burny, a self-harmer who scorches his arms with cigarettes, then wears long sleeves so as not to frighten the kids. Save for the absence of redemptive humour, there's a distinct air of Samuel Beckett about some songs. With its lonely old protagonist struggling to summon memories of his past life, "It's James Now" is the song equivalent of Krapp's Last Tape, while the thoughts of the old-timers in "Cardboard Box of Batteries", "Waiting for Marty" and "Slingshot Professionals" are ably evoked by music which, on the latter, shuffles along like an old man in ill-fitting carpet slippers.

This album develops the organic small-band approach of Sky like a Broken Clock, with Phelps' guitar partnered by Jesse Zubot's country-style fiddle or trilling mandolin and Scott Amendola's inventive, shifting percussive backdrops. Occasional undertows of organ, accordion, Weissenborn (dobro-style) guitar and, on a couple of occasions, the glistening tones of Bill Frisell's jazz guitar add different hues and tints to individual songs, in subtly patinated arrangements that range from blues, folk and country to the relaxed, jazzy setting of "Window Grin", where an incorrigible rogue regards the almighty with a gambler's feeble hope: "Looks like God might play with crooked dice/ Eyes in the shadow and he doesn't look nice/ A mean boy throwing with a dirty hand/ As soon as he's not looking we'll sneak into the promised land". A marvellous, absorbing album.