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Label/Cat#: Warner Bros. Records – 584802-2
Country: US
 22 Feb 2019
Genre: Rock, Blues
Format: CD, Album
Tracklist
01. This Land (05:41)
02. What About Us (04:30)
03. I Got My Eyes on You (Locked & Loaded) (05:11)
04. I Walk Alone (03:44)
05. Feelin\' Like a Million (03:34)
06. Gotta Get Into Something (03:04)
07. Got to Get Up (02:37)
08. Feed the Babies (04:46)
09. Pearl Cadillac (05:05)
10. When I\'m Gone (03:4
11. The Guitar Man (04:27)
12. Low Down Rolling Stone (04:1
13. The Governor (02:21)
14. Don\'t Wait Til Tomorrow (04:05)
15. Dirty Dishes Blues (05:03)
16. Highway 71 (Bonus Track) (03:31)
17. Did Dat (Bonus Track) (06:42)
Gary Clark Jr. was born in the wrong era. In the 1960s or ’70s, he could easily have forged a career as a first-rank guitar hero: a Texan blues-rocker who can step on any stage and bring the place down with a searing guitar solo.
Prospects are different in the 21st century. The idea of a guitar hero was thoroughly undermined by punk and then pushed aside by increasingly computerized pop, dance music and hip-hop. For decades, vintage-style blues and the flesh-on-strings virtuosity it requires have been shunted toward nostalgia, preservationism and the die-hard realms of Americana. In 2019, Clark is an exceedingly rare figure, a bluesman who has a major-label recording contract and a worldwide audience, one he has built by tearing up stage after stage, show after show. While his songwriting has lagged behind his performing, he’s well aware of his strengths; he has alternated studio albums with live ones.
On “This Land,” his third major-label studio album, his songwriting has caught up with his playing. It has something to do with experience; now 35, Clark has been performing since his teens. It has something to do with the power of contrariness: that is, Clark’s determination to deliver the raw, analog, spontaneous opposite of crisply quantized digital content. And it has a lot to do with America in 2019, where division, frustration and seething anger can use an outlet with the historical resonance and emotional depth of the blues.
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