Kelly Joe Phelps – Sky Like A Broken Clock

For years, Oregon’s Kelly Joe Phelps has fascinated fans, many of them accomplished musicians, with his lap-style acoustic slide guitar technique. His virtuosity as a player and his skills as an interpreter of country blues classics have never been in question, and now, on his fourth album (his third for Rykodisc), Phelps has replaced his trusty stomp box for a rhythm section he met the day of the recording.

Larry Taylor (late of Tom Waits) sits in on string bass and drummer Billy Conway (Morphine) keeps time on what sounds like a snare and a shoe box on what are essentially the first run-throughs of the songs — all Phelps originals (a first) — while the tape unspools in a big room. Three days and 10 tracks later, the disc was done.

The result is understandably raw and primitive, evocative and emotionally effective, made the more so by Phelps’ weary voice and his precise fingerpicking, which is every bit as impressive as his slide. The lyrical content of the story songs (“Taylor John”), character sketches (“Clementine”, “Tommy”) and blues ballads (“Fleashine”, “Flash Cards”), which average more than five minutes each but hardly seem it, draws the listener into Phelps’ noir-ish world and keeps them there until long after the disc has ended. This is a mature piece of art, made all the more poignant by the pick-up nature of an ensemble that, somehow, sounds strikingly seasoned.