The Derek Trucks Band: Songlines : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Guitarist Derek Trucks is an instrumentalist who sings in every way but the obvious one. His electric slide work in Songlines' too-short first track, Rahsaan Roland Kirk's 1969 emancipation chant "Volunteered Slavery," is so human and stabbing it is more like amplified breath. In "Sahib Teri Bandi/Maki Madni," a medley homage to the late Pakistani vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the curvature and shout of Trucks' guitar connect the humbled joy in qawwali prayer to the Sunday-morning liftoff of a Baptist roadside-chapel service. Trucks is also the kind of bandleader who likes to sing, so to speak, with others. Some of his sharpest playing is in conversation-like tandem with lead vocalist Mike Mattison: the slithering dobro in the country blues "Chevrolet," the chunky R&B picking in "Crow Jane." Even in full flight, Trucks never runs riot over the earth-toned momentum of drummer Yonrico Scott, keyboard player Kofi Burbridge, bassist Todd Smallie and percussionist Count M'Butu. Still, Trucks' voice is the magnetism here. In his overdubbed exchange of skids and sighs in the Mississippi-via-Mali instrumental fantasy "Mahjoun," he sounds like he is literally serenading himself.