© Bluestronomical Publishing Inc. 2010

Liz Brown & The TomCats
Self Titled
Independent Label #4455301280 

Specializing in a form of gutbucket blues, Liz Brown and The Tomcats nail a groove and keep it locked and dirty.

Brown is good with the cigar box diddley-bow and gets that Ry Cooder swamp-rat vibe down pat in Willie Dixon's "Superstitious”. Her own composition "Leaving Atlanta" lifts a music tablature from Stevie Ray Vaughan's Texas Flood.

This CD is more an EP then an LP. Only six songs are here so the running time is twenty minutes or so. Budgetary constraints might be making an imposition. It's too bad. A listener won't get enough of a woman who is worthy enough to open for Bonnie Raitt.

And as much as she is a good singer, you wish Liz would play that diddley-bow a lot more. Fred McDowell's "Kokomo Blues" just becomes box-car hobo jungle boogie when Brown wraps her twanging sounds around it.

Hopefully in the future we will get to hear a full CD worth of music from this woman. It makes it tough on reviewers like me to come up with long running verbatim or lengthy paragraphs when there is too little to work with.

- Gary Weeks -


Southwest Blues CD Review - February 2010

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