[rating=3.50]
If you’ve ever watched and heard Sonny Landreth at his most intense — where he gets really, deeply vested in a solo, gets on that game face that’s not quite mad scientist but of a learned tinkerer who knows truths mortals can’t comprehend, and conjures the kind of slide guitar sorcery that puts him in league with the instrument’s greatest; you know that it isn’t his spare, inoffensive singing that packs rooms at Landreth shows throughout the world.
Modern guitar god, yes. And so here comes a really interesting addition to Landreth’s solo canon that’s going to be remembered as one of the most divisive albums of his career. Elemental Journey is comprised of all-instrumental compositions, but one that almost self-consciously strives to be something more than — or at least to the left of — the tone-bending, string-cavorting, paint-peeling wank-fest it could probably get away with.
Here’s Sonny and his coursing guitar tones as potent as you remember them, but instead of the swampy rock and blues you’re used to with the vocals removed, it’s something more epic, more textured, almost early-70s art house movie-score in scope. A handful of the songs feature strings arranged by Sam Broussard and performed by the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra. They aren’t going to be every listener’s cup of whiskey — particularly those predisposed to Sonny’s sparer, juke-joint-ready stuff — but they’re also passages. You get lost in them even as things turn weirdly proggy, and isn’t that the point?
There are guests aplenty. Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson and steel drummer Robert Greenidge all appear to hot the place up, and they’re welcome, if not needed — OK, so Satch burns a hole through "Gaia Tribe" — in the context of what Sonny’s wrought here. Three skinsmen grace the scene — Brian Brignac, Doug Belote and Mike Burch — along with Landreth’s usual co-conspirators, bassist Dave Ranson and keyboardist Steve Conn. The songs have cool sounding names like "Heavy Heart Rising," "Passionola," "Reckless Beauty," "Opening Sky" and the arguable album zenith, "Brave New Girl," that cry out to be referred to as "compositions."
But this is an album about elements. There’s some Caribbean-flavored groove, and hey, there’s a little jazz-rock, and what’s that, a little old world classical-style guitar that sounds drawn from a Medieval village and then warped into something spacier. Landreth’s focus throughout is, as usual, a love of note sustaining, drawing out tones and letting them glisten before reshaping them. Is this a masterpiece? No, you can’t go more than a few of these without wondering when Landreth’s going to walk out of these abstractions and get back to the dirty business of buzzsaw blues. But there are worse things than a guitar wizard lost in his own mystic-man brains for a short spell, no?
