Jackie Leven – Oh What A Blow That Phantom Dealt Me (Cooking Vinyl/Bonnier A)

The review (Bluesnews no. 51, autumn 2007, no author's name apparent) opens by noting that a wind of renewed attention blows around the “old Doll by Doll bandleader” and “master of Scottish Celtic singer-songwriter poetry and white Celtic soul”. The old Doll by Doll albums, which stand “in a context outside everything else”, are being released on CD for the first time. There was plenty of blues feeling in his “restless, gypsy-born soul” even then, but never has the blues nerve been laid so openly bare as on some tracks of the new solo album. It is named after a “historic remark” by Don Quixote when he had to concede defeat in the fight against the windmills, cultivates America's dark roots soul, staged through several guest appearances by Johnny Dowd, and contains much of Leven's classic Celtic melancholy. In England the critics have gone “surprisingly wild”; together with the coming interest in the Doll by Doll records, the “Norway-friend” Leven, who has written five or six songs from his travels in Norway, faces good times.

Singled out is “Another Man's Rain”, based on his experience of the “most beautiful train journey in the world” from Drammen to Bergen, perhaps the loveliest and finest of the Norway songs if anyone were to gather them on one album. There, and on the strolling blues classic “Childish Blues”, one hears why so many admire Leven's guitar playing: “Brilliant!” He wants mix and production to bring out the detail and naturalness of the playing; “Kelly Joe Phelps and Chris Smither sit on the sidelines and applaud”. The reviewer is “once again impressed beyond most of what is released in music today”: Leven writes from feelings and thoughts very few are able to convey, and uses bluegrass musicians, blues-influenced older British rock musicians and America's perhaps most special roots artist, Johnny Dowd, to get the distinctive mix for which Norwegians love him.

With homages to the singer-songwriter Judee Sill, “the prostituted and heroin-addicted bank robber who never got to shine”, and the recently deceased British blues eccentric Kevin Coyne, the album ranks among Leven's very best, alongside The Mystery of Love … and Shining Brother Shining Sister (“Sister Shining Brother” in the magazine). Praised are “Vox Humana”, “One Man One Guitar”, “Another Man's Rain”, the 1950s r&b- and swing-flavoured, highly entertaining “I've Been Everywhere” and the blues feeling of “Childish Blues”. The closing line: Leven never stops impressing “as the most important artist of the British Isles”, and the album should be prescribed “on the blue prescription nationwide”.