Devon Allman

Names carry baggage; look at Julian Lennon, unable to get past people looking at his father. Now double the problem where your father is one of the Blues music greats and your uncle is still remembered as the greatest white slide player of all time.
Devon Allman carries his baggage but his previous album with Honeytribe and the albums with the Royal Southern Brotherhood mean that he is digging his own furrow and truly making a reputation based on his voice, playing and songwriting and not just genetics.

The music here is utterly modern Blues with Jazz and Latin influences as well as real New Orleans overtones that just pervade the album like the humidity of the deep south. He has his signature on every track and stayed well away from the superstar friends approach using a core of Felton Crewes on bass, Giles Cory – guitar, Tom Hambridge on drums and Marty Sammon on Hammond B3.

Good doesn’t even begin to cover this set. The playing is superb throughout and Allman’s vocals are throaty and filled with soul – his guitar is no shambles either – while the band play hot and smooth with just the right amount of flash and dazzle. The album is loaded with dense rhythms and there probably isn’t one of the 48 minutes that lies flat.
‘Traveling’ is a perfect case in point with the whole band rocking and funking it up like Little Feat at their peak. That moves into ‘Midnight Lake Michigan’ which is slow and heavy, humid and threatening – 9 and a half minutes of pretty well perfect Blues with no let up in the tension or the heat.

The opening tracks show a lot of his heritage but this is an album that declares that Devon Allman is a star in his own right with a guitar voice all of his own and more than worthy of the family name.