2018 CD Reviews - Beth Hart & Joe Bonamassa - Black Coffee

Beth Hart & Joe Bonamassa

Black Coffee

J&R Adventures - 2018

http://www.hartandbonamassa.com

As anyone who's ever read anything I've written about Beth Hart and Joe Bonamassa knows, I am a big fan of both artists.

To the surprise of no one, when they teamed up to do the two previous collaboration album I loved the discs.

And now comes Black Coffee, the third album in their musical partnership. I have to say that despite listening to this album for a few months since its release, I'm a little bit disappointed in this one.

The album opens up with a cover of Edgar Winter's "Give It Everything You Got", a real kick in the pants way to start things off. It's faced paced and has a lot going on in the song, so it is a feast for your ears. It's a great song and the performance of it here was fantastic.

But then comes what I think was the main issue I had with the disc. Despite all the songs being well played, a few of them just weren't as interesting to me this time around. The Etta James song "Damn Your Eyes" started out slow but got more of a spring in its step as it progressed. There's a blazing solo from Bonamassa in there as well. And yet for all that, I just didn't particularly care for the song that much.

There's only 10 songs on the album and it pretty much went back and forth with a great song and then one that left me wondering just why the hell they chose to record it.

I loved their cover of Ike and Tina Turner's "Black Coffee", but the only real interesting thing about "Lullaby Of The Leaves" for me was the guitar work.

A devastatingly awesome cover of "Why Don't You Do Right" found Hart doing kind of a slinky vocal turn to the old blues song while there was a subtlety to the guitar work I found greatly appealing. Then they turned around on "Saved" (originally sung by Lavern Baker) and put forth a fast paced musical romp that would've had me up dancing if I possessed the slightest bit of rhythm. Another Baker sung song got the cover treatment on Black Coffee. It's called "Soul On Fire" and I thought it was just a sweet sounding slow to midtempo track.

I didn't much care for the cover of the Lucinda Williams song "Joy" though. It just felt so off and out of place to me. But I did like the guitar work on "Sitting On Top Of The World", a song by the Mississippi Sheiks.

The album closes out with "Addicted" from Klaus Waldeck and despite the number of times I listened to this album, it barely made any kind of impression on me.

So while I do think this is a good album, Black Coffee is to me clearly a bit inferior to the first two Beth Hart & Joe Bonamassa albums. But to be clear, I am of this opinion solely because of I didn't like some of the songs chosen for the disc. When it comes to the performance, all ten songs are given a new life from the duo and when you do that to songs that may or may not have gotten their just due in the past, that can't be a bad thing.

Rating - 3 stars out of 5