Reviews for Kelly Joe Phelps

Guitarist Kelly Joe Phelps has re-examined his faith and taught himself to play bottleneck slide. Both processes have been inspiring experiences that reveal themselves on his 10th recording as a leader, the solo album 'Brother Sinner And The Whale' (Black Hen Music)

I've been following guitarist Kelly Joe Phelps pretty much since his first album, recorded in Portland and featuring revelatory takes on old country blues songs. He's gone to some pretty cool and sometimes pretty strange places with his music, usually based on lap steel traditions, but also recently fingerpicked guitar.

Kelly Joe Phelps makes you want to thank your lucky stars.

After all, what are the chances of an acoustic bluesman based in the American Pacific Northwest performing regularly in southern Ontario?

Few people have done more to keep the spirit of country blues alive than Kelly Joe Phelps, and any one who’s ever heard the 53 year-old Oregon native play the guitar, will surely agree that his abillities equal even those of the ancient blues legends that light the path he follows.

Acclaimed musician Kelly Joe Phelps has long been known for his amazing lap steel recordings. But, as he confessed to us recently during a recent video shoot, over the last few years, the singer-songwriter has basically stopped playing that instrument altogether. Instead, he has focused on standard guitar playing, writing and collaborating with music cohort Corinne West.

Blues musician Phelps traded in his lap steel for a bottleneck on this gorgeous concept record, which was largely inspired by the Book of Jonah. The stripped-down sound, featuring just vocals and guitar, is reminiscent of prewar blues 78s, while Phelps’ warm, inviting voice and skilled fingerpicking make Brother Sinner a gospel album that non-gospel fans can enjoy.

The late Stan Rogers (he died in an airplane fire in 1983) was a vital link between the folksong tradition of the British Isles, imported to the Maritimes and Newfoundland, and the new, introspective singersongwriter generation that included Joni Mitchell and James Taylor.

Maybe I should have just asked the easy questions.

After all, it’s definitely newsworthy that local guitarist Steve Dawson produced Kelly Joe Phelps’s new Brother Sinner & the Whale, the Vancouver, Washington–based singer-guitarist’s second release on his Canadian friend’s Black Hen imprint.

Salvation is a term thrown around too casually in blues music. Dancing with the devil or getting down to your knees when the storm is the darkest; those decisions usually come down to the woman in the dress or the drink in the glass.

For six-string surgeon Kelly Joe Phelps, returning to his Christian roots wasn’t a desperate cry for help. It was simply a desire to change and find answers.

There’s more than a whiff of weirdness around this album. After a decade of adamantly refusing to play his signature slide guitar, the ramblin’ man of the Pacific Northwest chose this collection of songs to return to his bottleneckin’ roots.

Between the Bible and the blues, there is Kelly Joe Phelps.

The folk-blues musician's soon-to-be released Brother Sinner And The Whale is steeped in biblical lore and language but is not a Christian record outright. It has as much to do with the Delta blues of Charlie Patton or Son House as it does God's teaching.

There’s a time for conversion and a time for preaching. In Kelly Joe Phelps’ case, it’s time for both.

Since his debut Lead Me On in 1994, Kelly Joe Phelps has been known for singularly compelling slide-guitar music. On his new Brother Sinner and The Whale, Phelps shifts to the bottleneck rather than his customary lap slide for a sound that wouldn’t be out of place on a classic John Fahey or a Reverend Gary Davis record.

Gospel music has always been central to the fiercely-original blues of Kelly Joe Phelps. "Brother Sinner & the Whale," however, is his most spiritual album yet.

Kelly Joe Phelps warms up his audience with a resonator guitar clinic where he finger picks like an absolute Mississippi Blues champ on the track “Talking' to Jehovah.” The music on this record takes me back to the sounds of Colin James’s 1997 release National Steel, with very clean production and guitar playing that is simply out of this world.

Guitarist Phelps, with producer Steve Dawson apparently needed only to keep the recording equipment going, laid down this stripped-down set – straight-up mono with no supporting band – over three no-nonsense days.

Very few people can really pull off a true solo album, but Kelly Phelps is most definitely one of them. I reviewed a couple of his earlier releases (here and here) and learned well that you can't expect the expected from him, especially after the very striking Western Bell, a CD that stays with the listener long after the listening.

In 2009, guitarist and songwriter Kelly Joe Phelps pushed his own envelope with Western Bell, an all-instrumental, decidedly experimental record that has carved an iconoclastic niche in his catalog. Many thought it to be among his finest albums, and others felt it was too far outside the pale of his previous work to embrace. Their loss.

With an extensive background in jazz and blues, and years of experience with slide guitar, Kelly Joe Phelps abandons his lap steel for bottleneck on Brother Sinner and the Whale. It is, in essence, a blues guitar album, and he demonstrates such finger-pickin' mastery over the instrument that it seems an extension of himself.

After his last rather outré offering Western Bell had baffled many, Kelly Joe Phelps realised it was time for a bit of a rethink. His attempts to push his guitar playing as far as possible had perhaps gone beyond their logical limit, Phelps concluded that technique as an end in itself was rather boring.

Since his debut Lead Me On in 1994, Kelly Joe Phelps has been known for singularly compelling slide-guitar music. On Brother Sinner & The Whale out August 21 on Black Hen Music, Phelps shifts to the bottleneck rather than his customary lap slide for a sound that wouldn't be out of place on a classic John Fahey or a Reverend Gary Davis record.

Longtime Portland, OR musician Kelly Joe Phelps is releasing his ninth full-length album, Brother Sinner and the Whale. The locally renowned slide guitarist follows-up 2009’s Western Bell by revisiting his religious roots with a contemporary blues gospel record.

Kelly Joe Phelps has always followed his muse. From his first album in 1994, which combined the slide and fingerpicking techniques of John Fahey and Mississippi John Hurt with his own unique vocal and songwriting.

Very few people can really pull off a true solo album, but the bluesy slide-guitarist Kelly Joe Phelps is definitely one of them. On his latest, “Brother Sinner & the Whale,” Phelps handles all the performing duties — which is pretty much just his guitar and vocals — but delivers a complexity in this simplicity that needs to be heard to be appreciated.

With his 1994 debut Lead Me On (Burnside), Kelly Joe Phelps made his mark as a solo performer with smoky, heartfelt vocals; a signature slide guitar sound; and folk- and blues-based material that he recast and reimagined to make his own.

Brother Sinner & the Whale (Black Hen Music)

Kelly Joe Phelps makes you want to thank your lucky stars.

After all, what are the chances of an acoustic bluesman based in the American Pacific Northwest performing regularly in southern Ontario?

That place where blues and gospel meet, in performers like the Reverend Gary Davis, is where Kelly Joe Phelps’ Brother Sinner & the Whale (Black Hen Music) finds its home. If only Davis and other street preachers had enjoyed such clear recordings in their day. Phelps’ voice is like honeyed gravel, subtly, softly bending notes in the service of the sacred.

One of the most appealing aspects of singer/songwriters is their fearlessness in wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Whether revealing their most innermost ache, shedding light on the human condition, or just brimming with lust, these artists connect us to our humanity. It just hurts so good.

It is very obvious: Kelly Joe Phelps has seen the light. On his latest recording, Brother Sinner & The Whale, inspired by the Bible’s Book of Jonah, he sings about his life as an unhappy person and a sinner and of his ‘salvation’ by the Lord. After his last CD, Western Bell (2009) and a tour with singer-songwriter Corinne West, Kelly Joe decided it was time for some soul searching.

It hasn’t really been quiet around Kelly Joe Phelps since his debut album in 1995 “Me on Lood”(sic). This American singer/songwriter released an album every two years. In the 90’s he was triumphant as a virtuoso slide guitar player who showed a high blues content. His first albums are filled with own songs, traditionals and gospels.

Few albums walk the line between blues and contemporary gospel like Brother Sinner & the Whale; Kelly Joe Phelps’s bottleneck guitar blues collection has been reviewed positively by believers and nonbelievers alike, but there’s nothing veiled or vague about the redemption-heavy theme.

In which the Portland singer-guitarist "re-examines his Christian roots" and goes back to basics: songs for solo guitar and voice, churning through the undergrowth covering his doubting sensibility; an intensely technical examination of the gospel impulse through blues structure, sung with a warm, fuzzy tone but in that slightly detached, artful way.

With nine releases in 17 years, Kelly Joe Phelps is more studied than prolific. Yet as he reveals each new chapter in his musical story, his rich personal growth is fully documented.

Early in his career, Kelly Joe Phelps made a name for himself as one of the finest lapslide players of our time, and his late-’90s solo albums—the gospel-infused Roll Away the Stone and darkly poetic Shine Eyed Mister Zen—contain some of the most technically advanced acoustic lap slide ever captured on disc.

The first time I heard Kelly Joe Phelps (KJP), I had to put down my fork and walk over to the computer to find out just what in the hell Pandora Internet Radio was playing. I was literally moved. Had I a fork in front of me during Phelps’ Tuesday night performance at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, it would have sat still on the table, and the meal gone cold.

Mahalia Jackson once said: "When you sing gospel you have a feeling there is a cure for what's wrong" and a spirit of optimism shines through the new album Brother Sinner & The Whale from Kelly Joe Phelps.

What do you give the technology-idolizing age that has everything? How about an entire album of original, acoustic gospel blues, sung and played with a true believer’s late-night intimacy with life’s big ups and downs? Cut it anywhere, it bleeds the truth. “My God came to earth a humble man,” sings Phelps. “It was part of the divine master plan.

It’s often said that the devil has the best tunes. Kelly Joe Phelps would not agree. While not quite an apostate who has turned his back on the blues, he told No Depression magazine he had been a born-again Christian for some time. His new album, based on the Book of Jonah, reflects a profound reawakening of his faith.

This is affecting rural music, from the gifted acoustic guitarist Kelly Joe Phelps, who trades in his lap slide for fluid finger-picking and nimble bottle-necking as he abandons straight country-blues for spiritual concerns.

Kelly Joe Phelps is one of the premier acoustic blues guitarists of the last decade or so with a brace of albums featuring his lap steel playing and refreshing the traditions of the Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt and even John Fahey.

The small room at the Paradiso can be a disaster for singer-songwriters. Because often that room is used as a pit stop by th party goers from the big room. But today they handled it differently. They put up chairs, Kelly Joe Phelps doesn't have to earn the attention.

This thoughtful and moving artist has afforded himself the luxury of one microphone (OK, maybe two!), but just him, his guitar and his voice, and in mono, which in 2012 is a challenge. Kelly Joe Phelps seems to have gone religious, at least according to the lyrics and the titles of his songs ('Talking to Jehova', 'Pilgrim's Reach', 'The Holy Spirit Flood', 'Guide Me Oh Thou Great Jehova').

After the release of his 2009 album WESTERN BELL lead to a mixed response from industry and fans alike, Kelly Joe Phelps withdrew from the spotlight to undertake a period self reflection and evaluation. The conclusion was to hark back to his Christian roots and hone in on developing his song writing skills to complement the undoubted virtuosity of his guitar playing.

Ingolstadt – Finally it’s time. In two ways. Firstly, the concert season 2012/2013 in the ‘Neue Welt’ starts that evening. And secondly, after having tried so often but unsuccessfully over the last 13 years, promoter Walter Haber has finally succeeded in booking Kelly Joe Phelps from Washington, DC.

Wissen – ‘Again, any time’ is a phrase often used in internet business. It accurately describes the audience’s mood after Kelly Joe Phelps’ concert in the full foyer of the Kulturwerk in Wissen. Modestly tipping his well-worn hat, Phelps walked on stage and started his concert without much talking and kept his audiene spellbound with the blues from America’s South.

Kelly Joe Phelps has gone back to the well and emerged with a deeply satisfying album of deeply spiritual songs.

Kelly Joe Phelps has just recorded what must be the album with the most explicit lyrics about faith from a regular artist since Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming. The music is sublime, with the syncopated picking we’re come to expect from Kelly Joe and some tasteful bottleneck slide, all delivered with bluesy or folksy songs, full of melody, feeling and considerable…well, grace.

If Phelps lost any of his listeners with his rather experimental, instrumental Western Bell (2009), he can win them all back easily with this new album. Phelps returns to his roots: the country and gospel blues. All twelve numbers, including two instrumentals, have been inspired by Bible texts which Phelps has meticulously added to his website.

If high-calibre finger-picked acoustic blues, country and folk-styled guitar accompaniment is a dying art, someone forgot to tell Kelly Joe Phelps.

Kelly Joe Phelps may be from the Pacific Northwest but the blues is so much a part of his DNA that his songs are habitually steeped in the same doubts, despair and guilt as the great bluesmen from the deep South.

With this album Phelps is moving on and stating emphatically that "you can't sing about girlfriends and things like that forever".

Heartfelt personal developments inspired Phelps to write 11 of these 12 biblically themed gospel/blues songs. Accompanied only by his brilliantly played slide acoustic, he helps expand appreciation of blues styles other than vintage Mississippi Delta and Chicago electric varieties.

To my left, Kelly Joe Phelps, the bluesman with the warm and grave voice, who hunches over his guitar like it’s a tlaisman. His new album, Brother Sinner & The Whale, has been inspired by the book of Jonah. Said like that, it sounds pretty severe, but fortunately the singer has enough talent to infuse it with a good dose of groove.

NEW Kelly Joe Phelps could have just been an inspiring fingerpicking virtuoso but his work has always been infused with a meaningful spirituality that finds fertile ground on his new album inspired by the book of Jonah. Recorded in mono, ‘Brother Sinner & The Whale’ holds eleven perfectly sounding originals, linked by a remarkable unity of tone.

t’s as thin as the edge of a razor, the road separating Heaven from Hell, sin from salvation, redemption from despair. Kelly Joe Phelps has done a lot of musical research since his last album Western Bell, released in 2009. Three year later, this search leads him to the door of Steve Dawson in Vancouver.They have already made three CD’s together.

Spijkerboor. The American Kelly Joe Phelps likes to do it a lot and often: play ‘slide’. The technique where a metal case worn over one finger slides over the strings. ‘It’s a guitar technique that’s very close to singing’, says Phelps. ‘That’s why I like it so much. It becomes kind of a duet. A dialogue with my guitar.’

It is very obvious: Kelly Joe Phelps has seen the light. On his latest recording, Brother Sinner & The Whale, inspired by the Bible’s Book of Jonah, he sings about his life as an unhappy person and a sinner and of his ‘salvation’ by the Lord. After his last CD, Western Bell (2009) and a tour with singer-songwriter Corinne West, Kelly Joe decided it was time for some soul searching.

Review by: Gerrit Schinkel

Kelly Joe Phelps is inspired by old acoustic blues and by the bible. On Friday he will play at the Slotplaats in Bakkeveen.

On his latest album Brother Sinne r & The Whale (Black Hen Music/Continental Record Services/Munich) Kelly Joe Phelps discards the lap steel and returns to using the slide guitar. Once again he plays the kind of folk and blues which he has been doing for some time already. It’s a step back because the adventure of his efforts to escape from traditional song structures is missing here.

He doesn’t earn millions but just before his 53rd birthday he is able to play for nearly two weeks in all sorts of venues in Holland. Kelly Joe Phelps released a new CD earlier this month, called Brother Sinner & The Whale. He took the story of Jona as point of departure for a thematical CD which you could subtitle ‘Incorrigible Men Make A Right About Turn’.

Kelly Joe Phelps, with a debt of gratitude to Mississippi John Hurt.

The last Kelly Joe Phelps album, 2009's Western Bell, was preceded by a record company split and followed by mutters of dissatisfaction from his hardcore. Undeterred, and forsaking lap steel for bottlenecked National and Martin A35, the Oregon songwriter has found creative space to sculpt this rare jewel.

Kelly Joe Phelps's ninth album and first in three years represents something of a departure from previous work, but not a radical one. For this record he's abandoned his trademark lap slide to play bottleneck guitar instead; in fact this is the only instrument featured on the entire album.

After, three years and a whole lot of soul searching, Kelly Joe Phelps teamed up with Steve Dawson to record his latest album, Brother Sinner and the Whale. Prior to making a stop in Edmonton, Phelps shared his Firsts, Lasts and Favourites with Vue.

First album

If Kelly Joe Phelps can be said to have been backsliding on his religious education in the last while, he’s now slipping forward with his latest album, Brother Sinner and the Whale.

After a number of recent collaborations with amongst others Corinne West and Sarah Harmer, the American country blues singer and guitar player Kelly Joe Phelps returns to his roots. It’s just the guitar and his voice on this album. And really, you don’t need any more than that with Phelps. The man knows how to get maximum yield from minimum means.

Over the space of his 15-year recording career, Vancouver, Washington-based fingerstyle guitarist, singer and top-notch songwriter Phelps has always been on his own maverick wave length.

he music of Kelly Joe Phelps is often characterized as a mixture of delta blues and jazz, but it transcends such limiting labels. He started by playing and studying jazz, drawing inspiration from free jazz players like Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He later converted to blues and blended elements of the two into his own style.

An album that hasn’t left my playlist since it arrived a couple of weeks ago is Kelly Joe Phelps’s new one, Western Bell. For some KJP fans, this album is bound to be bitter sweet: it finds Phelps returning to slide guitar, but on a completely instrumental album, which means many will no doubt miss his haunting vocals. Me, I just love this CD.

Kelly Joe Phelps has been touring the world for the last 15 years and this is his eighth album; you could say he's been around the block. It shows. Western Bell is 11 tracks of instrumental guitar that will make your jaw drop off.

You don't normally associate experimentation with acoustic blues, but Kelly Joe Phelps is not your run-of-the-mill bluesman.

He started playing guitar as a 12-year-old growing up in Sumner, a working class and farming area in Washington state.

Phelps played free-form jazz before he traded in his bass guitar for a Gibson flat-top and turned to acoustic blues.

U.S. guitar icon Kelly Joe Phelps once said he wasn't sure what he would be doing if he weren't making music.

It is all he's thought about, Phelps said, since he was 14. He'll turn 50 later this year.

"There are a lot of things I'm sure I would enjoying doing. I just don't know what they are because of that goofy guitar," Phelps told his hometown paper in Oregon.

Kelly Joe Phelps releases his eighth - yet first solely instrumental - album, Western Bell, expressing cool rhythms of a vast and haunting western landscape. With no vocals at all, Phelps's slide guitar takes the lead, producing poignant and wistful ballads that a voice couldn't give proper credence to.

Not that we don’t like his lyrics and singing but us longtime Phelps fans have longed for an instrumental album that allowed him to take his instrument and run with it. This all new album finds him alone in the studio with just his guitars exploring the limits of his vast skills.

I was admittedly a little late getting to the Kelly Joe Phelps party when I first heard his third record, 1999’s Shine Eyed Mister Zen. With his acoustic guitar flat in his lap, Phelps was able to carve out a style of folk blues with his bar slide that seemed to be as much about free jazz as Fred McDowell.

SOUNDS LIKE: Pastoral Americana banjo-strummin’ folk music you can set your toe-a-tappin’ to.

WHY/WHY NOT: I find a great deal of pleasure in listening to Americana guitar-pickin' folk. The simplicity, honesty and downright tenacity of this genre lends itself to setting musicians apart. Take Kelly Joe Phelps for example and his new instrumental record, Western Bell.

Guitarist and songwriter Kelly Joe Phelps has always traveled an iconoclastic, enigmatic path.

Kelly Joe Phelps, the American singer and guitarist, is another in the vast club of musicians who reside in relative obscurity despite critical validation with every release. On this latest opus he dispenses with the oblique wordplay that marks his usual output and concentrates instead on his considerable skill with six strings and piece of wood.

In a world adequately full of praise for the likes of Leo Kottke and John Fahey, surely there is room for Washington’s Kelly Joe Phelps. His eighth album of solo acoustic guitar improvisation should be enough to land him status in the company of legends, if he isn’t there already.

Kelly Joe Phelps has built a reputation as a master solo slide guitarist throughout his 20-year recording career, and anyone who has ever seen him live can attest that he performs with as much intensity, if not more, than the average band.

Kelly Joe Phelps has been travelling with the blues for over a decade and a half. Before that he was a jazz musician, bass player, music teacher and improviser. First and foremost, he is a songwriter and guitar player of both the straight and slide variety.

When Bill Frisell and Leo Kottke are in your corner, you don't have to worry much about who isn't…and that pair has already put their stamp of approval on Kelly Joe Phelps' music.

Avant garde fingerpicking here

Slide guitar maestro, back in the Delta at last.

It's not exactly what record labels consider a good career move, following up your best and most successful singer-songwriter album with a completely solo acoustic guitar collection. But Kelly Joe Phelps has never been one for following the rules, and Western Bell is so often exquisite, and always intriguing, that his commercial divergence is our gain.

Kelly Joe’s latest record is an entirely solo, exclusively instrumental offering that both reflects on his life and experiences and expands his personal musical envelope. In the latter context, you must therefore expect more than a modicum of comparatively uneasy listening within a genre-defying musical landscape that’s impossible to pin down.

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.

Sometimes you just have to shut up and play your guitar. For Phelps that time is now. The Washington picker's eighth CD is a back-to-basics affair, with 11 lulling solo instrumentals played on six string, 12-string and lap-steel guitar. Some are folksy; some are bluesy; none are showoffy; all are gorgeous, if somewhat overly atmospheric. Don't get rid of the mic just yet, dude.

After a trio of song-based albums, on which his original trademark lap slide guitar seemed to have long since gone, this all-instrumental selection for Steve Dawson's Black Hen label brings Phelps's guitar skills right back into the foreground - but not in the way one might expect.

This famed fingerstyle and blues guitarist gets adventurous with 11 improvisatory pieces that are meant to shake things up. Kelly Joe Phelps stretches his technique to just-this-side of the breaking point, utilizing alternate tunings, strange rhythms, odd fingerings, and a general lack of regard for tradition.

The singer-songwriter's eighth album starts with an instrumental and ends with an instrumental too. The nine tracks in-between are, er, solo instrumentals - there's not a peep from him vocally.

They spend a lot of years on the road, meandering here, there and everywhere, letting the music be their guide.
Such is the life of a touring musician -- the long days, the excitement of the unknown and the relief of being able to take the stage nightly and do what one does best.

One of the most expressive vocalists within the Americana genre, Kelly Joe Phelps has also long been recognized for his dexterity within various guitar styles.

On his latest album, Phelps sings not a word. Instead, in producing a nocturnal collection of 11 solo guitar instrumentals, the West Coast native allows his six and 12 strings to reclaim their rightful place.