Every newly emerging guitar hotshot needs a USP. Dan Patlansky’s is that he comes from South Africa, a place not renowned as a nursery for modern-vintage bluesman. But you wouldn’t know it from his transatlantic rasp, or the warm Midwestern take on the genre that constitutes this follow-up to 2016’s Introvertigo.
Patlansky’s supple guitar wraps itself around warm-bodied electric piano on Never Long Enough, and Eyes jerks and grinds over a bass line that will have Stevie Wonder on the phone asking if he can have it back. The odd dime-a-dozen blues plodder (Judge A Man) is offset by the all-axes-blazing high point Dog Day. The net result is undeniably good, but falls short of greatness.
