Tom Jones
Praise & Blame

Sometimes trusting your musical instincts can lead to pleasant surprises that reason doesn't even question. Who would have ever thought that a Tom Jones album could be a revelation? The first rumors about this album were the colorful phrases from the executives of Island Records, Jones' label, who immediately thought it was a joke after the Welshman with the golden voice presented them the new songs. The echoes of that Sex Bomb that so successfully relaunched him in the music market were still lingering in the air around the Island executives and me, only to be immediately crushed and obliterated as soon as the first track of this album starts.

That with that voice Jones could afford to sing whatever he wants is beyond doubt, that his association with Elvis since the mid-sixties, complete with sequins and the lights of Las Vegas, and his first failed attempt to approach country music in the eighties, are not valid credentials to justify such a perfect album like this one.
Jones dives into the dust of the highways and the smell of worm-eaten wood from old abandoned churches, just like the one on the cover, taking a trip to New Orleans and emerging victorious with an album "American" that Johnny Cash would have loved.

Jones is a chameleonic animal, still charming at seventy but who has finally decided to show the small and true signs of time that have also taken hold on his body yet leaving that gift from God, his voice, intact.
The entire work and the selection of songs seem to be inspired by God, in search of redemption. Sacred gospel, blues, rock'n'roll, rockabilly, and country are the ingredients of this album.
Produced by Ethan Johns, one of the most sought-after producers in recent years, who has already worked with Ryan Adams, Ray Lamontagne, Kings of Leon, and Paolo Nutini among many others, and played by great musicians including the producer himself on guitars and Booker T. Jones on piano.

The album opens with a Dylan song retrieved from that great album Oh Mercy (1989), What Good Am I?, perhaps placed at the start to give this work a deep meaning, asking himself and making his own the question posed by Dylan (How can I say I'm good if I say foolish things? / And laugh in the face of what pain creates?). Does Jones really want to turn a new page? Or is it just a pleasant and amusing jest?
The songs that follow are a good answer, leaving it to the listener to find the goodness of the offering. I have been won over by it.

The more rock songs range from the Lord’s invocation of the gospel-blues in Lord Help written by Jesse May Hemphill, with rising guitars prominently featured and becoming clattering in Burning Hell, a blues by John Lee Hooker that Jones sings as if he always had the devil on his side and that you would never have expected. And what to say if Strange Things is transformed into a rockabilly with female choruses just like Don't Knock and Didn't It Rain that would have made his old friend Elvis happy. To counterbalance the testosterone rock'n'roll of these tracks, Jones places some gems of dark country ballads like the prayer If I Give My Soul by that authentic Christian outsider Billy Joe Shaver, Did Trouble Me or Nobody's Fault But Mine where Jones' voice is exalted in an applause-worthy interpretation. To close the album, perhaps a thank you and tribute to those who have been able to reinvent their careers from these types of albums, perhaps singing with more understanding, it must be admitted, of suffering and faith in the Lord. Ain't No Grave and Run On (the God's Gonna Cut You Down of the Man in Black, here becomes a blues) have more than one connection to the last Johnny Cash of the American Recordings. Albums that have seemed to show the way for artists relaunching their careers like the latest works of Neil Diamond, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Plant, and from today, Mister Jones. Waiting for the next move to understand where to place this album which definitely deserves a listen.