Emotion & Commotion By Jeff Beck

Stephen Colbert once described Jeff Beck as the guy who has the world’s highest score at Guitar Hero even though he’s never played the game. And he’d be right. He’s one of the most influential guitarists in modern times and is likely to be somewhere near the top of every ‘Best Guitarists Ever’ list ever compiled. Even though his career has spanned more than forty years, he’s still bringing out top-quality music – such is the case with his seventeenth studio album Emotion & Commotion.

Beck does well to set himself apart from his peers on this record, because where Slash, for example, made his recent record very commercially viable, feeling the need to add a voice to every song and ultimately fragmenting the continuity of his album as a whole, Beck places the focus of the album on his guitar sounds and only adds guest vocals on four of the ten tracks.

This means that Joss Stone’s two appearances on the record (“I Put A Spell On You” and “There’s No Other Me”), and the songs sung by Imelda May (“Lilac Wine”) and Olivia Safe (“Elegy For Dunkirk”), while very melodic to listen to, almost end up feeling like intrusions into this soaring ode to the power of guitar music.

While a lot of the songs on the album are cover versions (“Corpus Christi Carol,” “Nessun Dorma,” “I Put A Spell On You”), Beck plays every song beautifully and takes such care to let the music take flight from his guitar instead of tearing off into a loud solo at every possible (although he does bring a bite to tracks like “Hammerhead”). The orchestral accompaniment to a lot of the songs makes the record sound more like a classical CD than a modern blues record overall – “Nessun Dorma” and “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” are particularly uplifting.

So the lack of a constant vocalist and the classical vibe on it may not give Emotion & Commotion a lot of mass appeal to people looking for a modern rock record, but it’s already garnered Beck his highest chart debut to date, and will definitely please rock snobs and guitar aficionados everywhere.