Let's just say I was in for a shock. Peter Green is back in a BIG way. Great ensemble playing plus great songs make this one of the best new albums I've heard in months. The guitar work on this is simply amazing; it's hard to tell whether it's Peter Green or his bandmate Nigel Watson who does the fine leads, but the guitar playing is consistently good-in fact, nothing short of spectacular at times. Green also plays harp quite well on a couple of cuts here. The rest of the band kicks ass, too, on piano and Hammond B3, bass, and drums, with some tasteful backup singers and horns added on a few cuts. There's not a bad player among them, and all well-produced. Real nice. Only the vocals are weak here at times, but the playing and songs are so strong that they more than make up for that.

And those songs-my, my, my, these guys really know how to write. Keyboard player Roger Cotton, bassist Peter Stroud, and guitarist Nigel Watson all contribute well-crafted songs, and Green does one self-penned instrumental. My favorite song on the disc is "Real World," a spooky rumination on the theme of dream vs. reality-written by Cotton but no doubt something that Green knows a lot about. Another great song is "Shadow On My Door," a bluesy rant about evil, accompanied by talking wah-wah guitar. This one could've come right out of the late 1960s-and I mean that in a good way. And then there's "Downsize Blues (Repossess My Body)," a funny ersatz classic blues about a middle-aged guy who complains, "I got too much on my plate" and who is "searching for the thin man within."
I liked this disc so much that I immediately went and ordered Me and the Devil: Peter Green and Robert Johnson, which pairs two CDs of Peter Green's highly-regarded reworking of the Johnson oeuvre with one CD of Johnson's original 29 songs. A bargain box set on Amazon.com: just $30.38. I can hardly wait 'til it shows up at my door.

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