Two collaborative albums with Joe Bonamassa raised Beth Hart’s rock profile. This eighth solo album, though, sees her exploring older ideas of the blues, on Coca Cola adopting a dreamy, reedy, little-girl voice halfway between Billie Holiday and Marilyn Monroe.
She’s also a creatively bawdy lyricist in updated Bessie Smith style, typically finding herself falling for bad men, as in Fire On The Floor where her phrasing stretches and slurs under the incinerating heat of a passion that ‘can’t be tamed or satisfied’.
Best of all is No Place Like Home, a road song that sounds like it’s set in the wrong town just before Christmas, its emotion uncoiling from somewhere deep. It could be one of Tom Waits’s heartbreakers.
