An answer song as such to Robert Johnson’s “HellHound On My Trail”, blues guitarist Dan Whitley parses his sound down on “Devil Is On Your Trail” to notes on an electric guitar echoed with strummed out licks: it is minimal in the extreme and all the more spooky for it. When Whitley plays a run on of licks, I’d say a solo but he is playing solo any way, the notes have the haunted rush of a phantom, an evil spirit, chasing you.
Dan is like a blues King in exile, he appears now and then and releases a track on soundcloud and then everybody who gets to hear it, last year’s “Calling All Gods” was magnificent blues boogie, raves about him and then he goes silent again and we wait for him to re-emerge.
“Devil Is On Your Trail” is even better, indeed, even now I’m not certain it isn’t a classic I’m not aware of. The entire enterprise is old time blues, like it bypasses the UK blues explosion, and heads straight for the progenitors.; this is as ancient, maybe I mean mythic, as the greatest of the devil stories, a character more important, or at least on equal footing, as God when it comes to the blues.
Whitley stakes his claim to the blues he derives his power from, he taps into the primal instinct but takes it from the reverse, and merges forward like a shaman. With his blonde visage he is like a vengeful angel, untill you realize the devil on her trail might be him.
Grade: A