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Great music can be found in the most unexpected of places, and so it was with my introduction to Sean Taylor when I encountered him playing in The Beehive in Swindon on a quiet week night. Not that it's unusual to have great music in such an established pub, it's just that I wasn't planning to be there and this led to me receiving the album in the post a week or so later and I have to say it's one of the best things I've been sent in a long time.

Sean Taylor is a musical illusionist. He manages to take the raw ingredients of an emotionally rich voice and mainly just an acoustic guitar and create haunting soundscapes that immediately conjure up Southern Bayous, long desert highways and ghost towns. But if the opening title track and Revelation sum this approach up, it is really only a starting point. Salvo, for example, is an electric guitar wash of eerie sounds that would beat totally at ease on a David Lynch soundtrack and the album even bows out with the soulful, almost classical piano piece, The River Merchants Daughter. Nightmares is also a song that pushes the albums boundaries, a claustrophobic and hypnotising jazz inspired track that is only to be played with the light on.

What makes the album work so well is that even with such forays into musical realms not normally ventured into by blues musicians, there is still an overall coherence to this body of work. But if the music is innovative stuff, the lyrical input is just as invigorating. Mixing the standard images of blues mythology with more metaphysical thoughts, Taylor manages to lyrically match the other worldliness that the music evokes. There is no "woke up this morning" or "ever since my baby left me" here, well, certainly not in an obvious way. The human condition, life, love and loss are all approached with the eloquence and thought process of a philosopher rather than that of a bar fly.

Blues in many ways is a genre that vey much lives in the past, there seem to be strong rules and unbreakable traditions both real and imagined. This is the very reason we need artists such a Sean Taylor, if blues is ever going to move into pasture new. In short it is cracking album, one that dovetails familiar traditions with wonderfully imaginative new directions and one that proves once and for all that even a young man from Kilburn can create a powerful blues mythos that holds up against the finest the genre has to offer.

Learn more about this author, Dave Franklin.
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