Ben Prestage: Real Music

[John (Biscuits and Gravy) Davy]

www.myspace.com/bprestage

Sporting a brakeman's hat and a full-on Seasick Steve beard, here comes young Ben Prestage from Florida as the latest entrant in the game of rediscovering acoustic blues. Doing a virtuoso one-man-band thing - thumping his foot drums, picking a bass rhythm and firing out some fairly extraordinary guitar lines, all the while singing like a man possessed - you could easily be mesmerised by just how anyone could do all those things at once. Actually, for me one man bands always end up sounding a little frenetic (honourable exception: Mark Hamilton aka The Bang-On Boogie Band) and there's a little of that even with somebody as good as this guy clearly is. I find myself thinking that he should hire a rhythm section to give himself the space to get a little more soul into his blues.

Ok, I've got that off my chest; now I can tell you that Ben Prestage is really good. Dipping into the vast catalogue of acoustic blues there are sixteen songs here of which only a small handful will be familiar to occasional blues fans. There's two of his own songs, a few from the tradition of unknown authorship and an eclectic mix of old blues heroes plus Johnny Cash's God Is Gonna Cut You Down and Dave Carter's Crocodile Man. Singing mostly in a style that affects the sly, throaty growl of a much older man, Ben stomps, swings and occasionally smooches his way through these songs giving us a fair old tour of all the moods and styles of the acoustic blues. I don't know the Johnny Cash song he covers and I sure wouldn't recognise it as a Johnny Cash song: very dark and swampy it sounds more voodoo than gospel.

Interestingly, his own songs are sung in a voice that sounds more natural; not exactly smooth but they don't sound forced at all in contrast to some of the covers. On top of that his songs fit in to the company they're keeping really well so that it feels that next time around it would be good to hear the old songs as guests amongst his own material rather than the other way round.

His guitar playing is great, really assertive, the little lines and runs coming like small explosions of musical energy, very percussive in style. He's got plenty of tricks in his bag to hold the attention and keep you fired up. Sweetly, the album closes with Gary Davis' Buck Rag and this feels like a cool shower after the heat of what comes before; wouldn't be surprised if that's his "Goodnight, thanks for being here" tune, too. Definitely a man to catch live I would say.
John Davy