Dan Patlansky - Move My Soul

But it’s the strongest album I have heard this year. Of any kind.

Blues junkies would call it ‘versatile’, but for me, that’s too detached. It is a fully-realised album, sometimes caressing, sometimes rampaging, that begs to be listened to as a suite.

Think of it as a series of in-your-seat, out-of-your-seat-and-on-the-table moments. “Big Things Going Down” is the latter, a momentous epic that floats through ten minutes of peaks and troughs as if it was thirty, and still ends too soon. Faster, less compromising, and more fun with a glass of “fruit” juice, is the rapid lovin’ of “That’s Alright Mama”. Then there’s “Backside of Paradise”, a slow-cooked cauldron of hoodoo and voodoo that invents the perfect origin story for Patlansky himself:

They say I was born on a stone at night
Jammin’ to the blues

Albert Frost will have something to say about it, but Dan is South Africa’s most prodigious, virtuosic guitar talent. Ask any recent All Black about the ‘T’ word, though, and they’ll tell you: talent doesn’t mean squat without end product. Move My Soul is Patlansky’s final-winning performance and it should be his Webb Ellis Trophy. Now he needs to find a little luck, or perhaps make some of his own: time to hit the Crossroads.