Sunday Times

While his virtuosic guitar skills are enormously respected by his fellow musos, notably Bill Frisell, Kelly Joe Phelps has remained a shadowy figure, operating in the area where Americana backs up against the blues. With his eighth studio album, Phelps has enriched that mix by returning to the modern jazz that got him started as a teenager, and recorded a series of improvised instrumentals on the solo acoustic. The result is never less than interesting, but compared to Phelps’s more visceral efforts on the slide guitar, or fronting his own groups, it’s an austere listen. You can’t help but admire the ingenuity with which Phelps introduces strange discords, eccentric tunings and dizzying runs into tunes with a loosely traditional feel and structure; but, in the end, this stands as a bold experiment that doesn’t exactly prove anything.