Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

There is no doubt that Blues as an artform needed to reinvent itself in the 21st Century as it found itself on the point of collapse, of suffering self-destruction to its lack of ability to coax and lure new fans to its ailing body. There is assurance that Blues was dying, and even a resurrection of the genre would only give it a limited time scale of survival as decent and legends remained, but nobody was willing to take their place in the heated arena.

Fast forward 25 years, look back to the moment when the godfather of modern Blues, Joe Bonamassa, took the music and shook it with a dedicated and honest appraisal and gave what can only be described as a new lease of life, not just reviving the beast, but verifying it for all to keep it alive; and as many have answered the call, from the first lady of modern British Blues, Joanne Shaw Taylor to Samantha Fish and Dana Fuchs, so the arena has been blessed with the continual presence of Texan supremo, Ally Venable.
Armed with her sixth album, fortified on the ability to shake the foundations of Money & Power with a strong and decisive will, Ally Venable showcases a combative stance in her own observation of how a once male dominated field has been broken, kicked squarely in the often-stale narrative and ever furnished gaze that older Blues came to represent.

Money & Power could be seen as cynically persuasive, the last decade of her unique involvement in the scene spent defying expectations and shattering antique viewpoints to the point where each shredded, splintered glass draws its own conclusions on the affairs of the music, and yet in each track, from the eye-opening Brown Liquor, which features Clarksdale’s finest Christone Kingfish Ingram, the excellent Do You Cry and Heal Me, Feel That Sting, and Keep Me In Mind, the imagery, the intensity and scale of the album hits out with ferocious belief. It does not decry the past allusions but insists that the modern-day struggle and conflict of the self is just as worthy a hill to stand upon and deliver grace and influence.

Ms. Venable wants to ‘Wake people up’, with her sterling guitar and a force of lyric as her weapons of choice, the musician doesn’t just wake the public, but shakes them out of their apathy with guile, precision and focus. An illumination of force that rains down a wealth of creative beauty on the listener.

Ian D. Hall