Albert King, Born Under a Bad Sign (1967)

It was love at first lick with Albert King's Born Under a Bad Sign. The title track hits you hard.

Hey, I get it. Sometimes I feel like I was born under a bad sign, too.

Then we move into "Crosscut Saw," which slows things down a bit. There's a more familiar blues shuffle, it's true, but that solo is dynamite.

This album is really something, and if there's any criticism to make of it, it would be the herky-jerky nature of the music. (Watch out: you might get whiplash.) I mean to say that one song does not transition so well into another, and that's because while this was originally an LP vinyl pressing, it's the result of these several different sessions over the course of a year, which for all I know might have been mostly intended for generating singles. But then there are these oddities where there are what sound like live recordings. Hard to make sense of how and when they were recorded. Whatever.

The focus here is on one great song after another, not exactly on some overall theme to that record. Although some points are knocked off for this, am I going to knock the fact that I'm hearing one good blues-rock song after another? It would be hard to, especially when this is so fun to get down to.