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Album reviews Music

Kelly Joe Phelps

Rating: NN


West Coast blues-folk troubadour Kelly Joe Phelps claims he loves the energy and interaction of recording live, but you wouldn’t know it from this dull collection culled from shows at two California venues. For someone with such a talent for richly detailed storytelling, Phelps offers nary a folksy anecdote nor a glimmer of cute crowd banter instead, his quietly strummed versions of seven tunes from his earlier recordings and two covers – Skip James’s Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues and a washed-out take on Reverend Gary Davis’s uplifting I Am The Light Of The World – are punctuated only by brief smatterings of polite applause. Stripped of the thoughtful arrangements that made 2003’s Slingshot Professionals so engaging, Phelps’s simple steel-guitar ditties falter, and the weirdly civilized audience response exacerbates the snooze-inducing vibe.

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