Artist:     Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley

Album:     World Full of Blues

Label:     Compass Records

Release Date:     09.30.2019 

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Rob Ickes—his surname aptly rhyming with yikes—can make a Dobro sing his heart’s praises in any manner of style. He’s graced the recordings and shared the stage with everyone from Merle Haggard to David Lee Roth. You’re missing out if you’ve never heard him play with Roth and the John Jorgenson Bluegrass Band on “Jump,” from the 2006 album Strummin’ with the Devil: The Southern Side of Van Halen. That alone, not to mention being a founder of Blue Highway, and a thirteen time winner of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Dobro Player of the Year award, shows that Ickes particularly knows his way through all shades of bluegrass. Trey Hensley sings in a rich baritone, at times reminiscent of Hag’s, and plays guitar with the hard blues and the harder country of his Tennessee birthplace in its woody cadence.

On their third album together, Ickes and Hensley offer a World Full of Blues in a style all their own. Age-old idioms are taken places together, hopeful, yet affected as we all are by the world’s current state of affairs. “Born with the Blues” eases open and ultimately jams like The Allman Brothers Band did, Ickes and Hensley in harmony and jabbing at each other with twangy guitars. Vince Gill joins Hensley for a verse of the Grateful Dead’s “Brown-Eyed Woman,” the band gallivanting. Hensley can sure sing, at his best here on his own tender ballad, “I’m Here but I’m Lonely,” which in a non-chaotic world full of blues would have country hit written all over it. When Taj Mahal begins singing “World Full of Blues (intro),” and playing it alone on a Dobro, reminders ring out about how related the blues and bluegrass really are. “World Full of Blues” then kicks into gear—a rough, rambling duet between Taj and Trey that winds down into Taj approximating Robert Johnson on “Come on in My Kitchen.” Priceless, all the way. They end it frenetically, with horns pumping, on Robben Ford’s “Rugged Road,” certifying their brilliance as a team.

Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley spin a gnarled root into a glistening web on World Full of Blues. Get caught up in it.

—Tom Clarke