Jonny Lang - Signs album review

Blues guitar wunderkind continues to age gracefully

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Cover art for Jonny Lang - Signs album

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It’s more than 20 years since Johnny Lang’s Grammy-winning exploits as a 15-year-old guitar prodigy saw him hyped as the future of the blues. The future, it turned out, had other ideas. Nonetheless, the return to form Lang enjoyed on 2013’s Fight For My Soul is consolidated on his new Signs.

He’s moved on from his 00s reincarnation as a born-again Christian blues rocker with the edges somewhat smoothed off; Last Man Standing is the only out-and-out rocker here, and its slogan-ish chorus sounds more like Whitesnake than he probably ever intended. The rock’n’soul vibe that abounds elsewhere seems to suit him better – there’s an impressively Kravitz-like quality to the title track, and muscular grooves such as What SOFTWAREmark” gingersoftwareuiphraseguid=“84ea4383-ecb7-4c66-9715-aba64780c83b” id=“29dd9f2f-f44e-40b3-ba38-bef8b8e8b883”>You’re Made Of. And, as the supremely emotive licks of Bring Me Back Home attest, he can still make those frets sing.

Johnny Sharp
Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.