Artist:     The Nick Moss Band featuring Dennis Gruenling

Album:     Lucky Guy!

Label:     Alligator

Release Date:     8.19.2019

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A robust group crammed onto a postage-stamp platform, kinetic energy and smoke and sweat slicing the air. Everyone should visit a Chicago blues club at least once. Walk into the right place with the right band playing, and the essence of blues music lives large. The Nick Moss Band featuring Dennis Gruenling is one of those right bands, and they’re sure as heck in the right place on Lucky Guy!

The rock-leaning albums Moss put out several years ago were good, but a tad unnatural—even though rock ‘n’ roll directly descended from the blues, and Moss, like many, embraced all kinds of rock and rollers as a youngster. But strapping, purebred Chicago-style blues has been Moss’ compulsion ever since he picked up the guitar three decades ago and began rattling the walls of some of those same Chicago joints his heroes did—oftentimes with his heroes. This is Moss’ second album of his overall 14, featuring veteran harp tornado Dennis Gruenling, and it’s a complete house afire.

Gruenling blows his midnight train whistle with the force and finesse of James Cotton right off the bat in “312 Blood,” Moss’ statement of being that kicks it all off. The band, rounded out by bassist Rodrigo Mantovani, keyboardist Taylor Streff, and drummer Patrick Seals, go to the heart of that 312 area code all together, and individually, their talents only matched by the boisterous fun they generate. The only non-original present, Johnny O’Neal’s swampy Sun single “Ugly Woman,” celebrates absurd attributes with infectious grooves. Moss’ snappy guitar underlines his happiness with his mate in the title track, and in “Sanctified, Holy, and Hateful,” he points it like a gun at the most powerful man in the world. They make quite a case there, low down and mean. The pace turns to jazz for the quick instrumental “Cutting the Monkey’s Tail,” a slick showcase for Gruenling and Moss, and for the sophistications of Mantovani and Seals. With friend and fellow guitarist Monster Mike Welch, Nick Moss shuts it down as if in the Delta, just the two of them, in a moment.

It takes talent, not luck, to make this kind of diversified, important blues album. No wonder Nick Moss was the recipient of the Blues Music Award for Traditional Male Artist of 2019.

—Tom Clarke