Buddy Guy: Sweet Tea : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

After forty years of recording and touring, Buddy Guy could afford to rest on his international-blues celebrity. And, to be perfectly blunt, he's done his share of coasting on a few of his recent albums, which brim with all-star guests and crowd-pleasing soul covers. But Sweet Tea is a different matter altogether: It's nearly as stark, savage and unsettling as Guy's classic work for the Chess label in the Sixties.

The new album is named after the studio in which it was recorded, in the heart of northern Mississippi hill country - the home of trance-boogie bluesmen such as T-Model Ford, Robert Cage and the late Junior Kimbrough. Guy covers their songs, taps into their sinister sound and rediscovers the world into which he was born in 1936, on a Louisiana sharecropper's farm. "I can't love like I used to," Guy sings, alone with his guitar on Kimbrough's "Done Got Old." The words are two steps from the grave, but the voice quivers with desire, and the album turns on this primordial tension between sex and death. The forbidding soundscapes comprise little more than one-chord drones and skeletal beats laid down by Ford's exquisitely elemental drummer, Spam. Guy roams over this spooky terrain like an outcast, wrenching notes from his guitar in fractured bursts and howling with anxiety on Davis' "She's Got the Devil in Her" and lust on Kimbrough's "I Gotta Try You Girl." It's a world full of temptation and cruelty, and on Sweet Tea, Buddy Guy's music once again sounds like it can't be satisfied.