Joel DaSilva – Everywhere From Here | Album Review

Joel DaSilva – Everywhere From Here

Track Of Life Music

www.joeldasilvamusic.com

10 Tracks/34:31

Based out of southern Florida, guitarist Joel DaSilva has been working hard in recent years, touring the country as well as Canada and South America. He has also made several appearances at the annual International Blues Challenge. Originally from Chicago, he has created a personal style that uses traditional electric blues as a starting point in combination with touches of rock, rockabilly, and other genres.

His latest features his warm vocals on an all-original program that gets off to a rousing start with “Shake,” sporting a pounding beat from drummer Chris Peet and a solid bass line from Robert Cleary infused with snarling guitar fills. “Everyday Man” is one of the disc’s highlights, with DaSilva pleading for relief as his life steadily spins out of control, vowing to stay strong in his resolve. He breaks out the woman-as-a-car analogy on “Cadillac Mama,” a tight shuffle with tasty guitar fills from the leader, Natasha Watkins on backing vocals, and Tom Regis on piano filling out the arrangement. DaSilva utilizes another common theme, that of a voodoo woman enchantress, on “Spell On Me”. Listeners are3 sure to fall under the spell of his heated fretwork.

DaSilva dives into the blues on the down-hearted “Time Heals All Wounds,” his sorrowful voice bringing the full weight of his pain to the fore. “Down In The Delta” is a dark, mysterious performance with wailing vocals answered by resounding guitar licks. Peet breaks out his pedal steel guitar to add a country flavor to the ballad, “Chasin’ The Sun”. The leader’s distorted vocal drives “This Day I Bleed,” another song about surviving life’s struggles while “Bad World” is built around rhythms from DaSiva’s Brazilian heritage, with John Calzavara supplying some soothing accordion. The closing track, “My Brazilian Soul,” is an instrumental that gives DaSilva a brief two minutes to showcase his mastery of the guitar.

By the end, you will probably want to go back and listen to many of the tracks again. DaSilva’s approach is definitely more grounded in the blues than many artists mining the blues-rock convergence point. As a singer, songwriter, and guitarist, he definitely is worth a listen.

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