Take Your Shoes Off
Robert Cray's spent the '90s evolving from West Coast bluesman to Memphis soul belter. So Cray's restrained guitar playing on his first CD for Rykodisc--after his unhappy departure from his longtime label Mercury--comes as no surprise. What's shocking is the utter perfection of his emulation of the signature sounds of the classic Stax and Hi Records singles of the '60s and early '70s. Cray's voice exhibits the delirious growl-to-falsetto flights of a youngAl Greenon numbers like "What About Me," "Love Gone to Waste," and the prisoner-of-love weeper "Pardon." But his arrangements--heavy on kick drum, fatback horn grooves, and organ flourishes--retain a grit that Hi in particular lost over time. And when he launches into a guitar solo like the probing corker that climaxes his take onWillie Dixon's "Toll the Bells," Cray rekindles the influence of his late mentorAlbert Collinsand reasserts himself as a torchbearer of stinging blues.--Ted Drozdowski