Peter Frampton Band

All Blues UMC

Outgoing guitar god burns cobwebs off a collection of standards.

Peter Frampton hasn’t wasted a second since his diagnosis with the progressive muscle disorder inclusion body myositis. Back in Classic Rock issue 262, while preparing a farewell tour, the veteran guitarist/vocalist told us about a gathering stockpile of “four years’ worth of albums” which would confront “my feelings about where I’m at, the good, the bad and the ugly”. Whatever came next, we sensed, would be the truest blues, the grit and grist, the sound of a man sending down the bucket to his emotional depths.

All Blues is not that album, though. On first inspection it’s a straight-up blues covers set comprising 10 standards you’d find on any 69-year-old’s shelf: Muddy Waters, BB King, Howlin’ Wolf… For the listener, coming out of the brace position, it’s difficult not to feel an early pang of disappointment; you can’t cattle-prod an artist into expressing their turmoil, but does Frampton need to borrow someone else’s?

But quickly casts its spell. Far from a scattershot selection, the choice of songs is loaded with significance; these are (‘), and impossible to miss how brutally apt the lyric of Wolf’s now sounds (‘’).