Joe Bonamassa
A New Day Yesterday

Bonamassa is possessed, driven by a musical passion and specifically by guitar playing that grants him infinite energy. He fiddles with all models of six-string acoustic and electric guitars, the latter hooked up to all kinds of amplifiers possible. Today he personally owns more or less 400 + 400, and when they rest in their cases and the amps are silent, they are all located in his home-museum near Los Angeles, called the Bona-seum… A true nerd!

On the electric guitars, he always uses thick strings, 0.12-0.51, to achieve stronger, clearer, and more resolute sounds, relying on his forearms of steel... the muscles that move his fingers are powerful enough to allow him to do whatever he wishes, even with instruments set in such a challenging way. All this without sacrificing an ounce of feeling and passion, which are always present.

Bonamassa, however, has one major flaw: he became too passionate at a young age, studied too much. So much so that his music sounds not only strong, gritty, right, virtuous, elegant, and enticing but also calligraphic and derivative. His masters are always there, lined up behind him… every now and then one of them steps forward and suggests to their fervent disciple a sound, a phrase, a cue so peculiar that for those well-versed in rock, blues, and soul, there is an immediate feeling of a small musical "theft."

These masters, it should be noted, are not his fellow countrymen, the inventors of blues and electric rock, but those great, great British musicians who in the sixties and seventies picked up what was left adrift by the fleeting season of American rock 'n' roll and promptly made it their own, elaborating it with European stylistic taste and melodic sensitivity and putting the guitar at the center of everything. I'm referring to the likes of Page, Beck, Gallagher, Blackmore, Kossoff, Clapton, Green, Richards, and the like.

There are a few American guitarists you can hear under his fingers, but always from that generation: Hendrix, Santana, Vaughan, Gibbons, Allman, Kath, West… but fundamentally Bonamassa is this: an American who, in his small way, has (and is still doing) bounced back in his country what the British invasion of the late sixties has discerned and accomplished, forever changing the history of popular music and placing rock and the electric guitar at the forefront of any musical development in human history, for several decades.

In this debut album dated 2000, Bonamassa, then twenty-three years old, shows that he is more than ready as a guitarist: his technique is sharp and robust, his idea of rock blues extremely muscular and at the same time passionately rendered, his attention to sounds and the right combinations between guitar and amp already manic and superb. What partially lags is his voice, very confident but neither exciting in tone nor variety. In the years to come, he will certainly improve it, not reaching great heights nonetheless.

Of the twelve tracks, half are covers, among which the one that, rightly, graces the album with its title stands out clearly. The rendition of the old Jethro Tull classic (1969, album “Stand Up”) sheds that psychedelic and smoky air of the original and transforms it into a knotted, powerful, driving hard rock blues.

Among the original compositions, "I Know Where I Belong" is a Hendrixian funky blues, or rather in the style of Steve Ray Vaughan when the lamented Texan leaned on Hendrix: "Miss You, Hate You" seems instead something between southern rock and Leslie West's Mountain.

"Colour and Shape" is more "modern," a great exercise in intimate blues, with variations and dynamic changes: there is already class, a lot of class in Joe's compositional efforts; his Stratocaster sounds thrilling and the unexpected, brief acoustic finale is delightful. "Headaches and Heartbreaks" is instead a heartfelt up-tempo, set to the guitar rendered Hendrixian once more by the intensive use of the Univibe effect, admirable yet inexorably tied to the deeds of the prematurely lost genius of Seattle. Solo of aching beauty on the occasion, in any case.

"Trouble Waiting" is a very scholastic boogie, filled as it is with stop&go of strict blues observance, including the solo which is pentatonic through and through. In "Current Situation" they mix B.B. King and Hendrix as if they were first cousins, only to abandon them enthusiastically in the solo, which this time steps out of the pentatonic to flirt a bit.

Great chops Bonamassa has, sharp and generous, prepared and mature already at the debut, which came after long years spent as an enfant prodige on stages since childhood. What he's missing is the… genius, the kind that flowed more or less abundantly in all his aforementioned masters. This is why his albums aren't and will never be a ten: at most a nine, or a seven in the case of the less successful ones, or an eight like this debut with (almost) a bang.