U2 The Joshua Tree, Led Zeppelin IV, Ted Nugent The Great White Buffalo, Jim Hendrix Electric Lady Land, Beatles, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club, Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon.

All crap compared to what I just heard. I mean, the first four tracks of The Joshua Tree would be a tour de force, if, released as an EP. The rest of the album just kind of fizzles out. Led Zeppelin is, well Robert Plant screaming and Jimmy Page fumbling through riffs in some kind of substance altered state. Dark Side of the Moon, good, pretty good in a black-lit tapestried room with those big Princess Leia ear phones on either side of one's head. The Beatles, maybe I am too young. Never liked the Beatles.

Joe Bonamassa's Dust Bowl, is perhaps the best recording I think I have ever heard. Okay, I'll go ahead and say it. It IS the best all-around recorded album ever digitized and sold in those impossible-to-get-open, ostensibly thief-proof land fill fillers.

Think Stevie Ray Vaugn with a little more precision, bless his soul.
Think Joe Satriani with less technician and more emotion.
Think BB King (Bonamossa opened for BB King when just 8 years old)
Think honey riffs floating off rosewood.

That's Joe Bonomossa.

Here's the deal. Bonamossa doesn't skimp on the music. You'll get close to a full hour of music for your $18.00. Anyone remember when cassettes and vinyl cost you $5.99 and every song was good? Now you pay $20 for a couple of hits and the rest has been picked up off the studio floor, dusted off and slapped on the end. And even then, you get maybe 30 minutes of music for your bill. Not with this guy.

Every song on Dust Bowl is a keeper. Bonamossa floats from grungy yet precise delta blues, lyrical with his instrument and earthy with his lyrics like in Black Lung Heartache; to soulful, slow, beautifully precise yet stocked with emotion, in Last Matador of Bayonne; to whimsical, almost country blues in a duet with John Hiatt in Tennessee Plates and his duet with Vince Gill, yes Vince Gill, in My Rowena. It's all good. And that's not bad for walking into Barnes and Noble, picking it up without ever hearing one track (our B&N did away with their headphone song sample system), slapping down my $20 and listening to it all the way home.

I know where my allowance is going for the next few paychecks...I am going to own, on CD, something I can hold, every thing he's ever recorded.