What sets Joanne Shaw Taylor apart in a frankly over-saturated field of excellent blues guitar players is her excellent songwriting. That and the fantastic warm alto she uses to sing her lyrics. Her sophomore album ‘Diamonds In The Dirt’ is where she really came into her own as a songwriter and while she would improve her songcraft later on, it is the first fantastic album she made. By subverting a few blues tropes and looking beyond the boundaries of the genre for her songs, ‘Diamonds In The Dirt’ represents Taylor’s first steps to becoming the excellent artist she would soon become.

Taylor’s debut album ‘White Sugar’ was good, but tended to focus more on her talents as a player than as a songwriter. She has said in multiple interviews that she was still developing her songwriting at the time and ‘Diamonds In The Dirt’ definitely shows signs of that development. Stylistically, ‘Diamonds In The Dirt’ moves away from bluesrock somewhat in favor of a more soulful approach that really suits Taylor’s voice. Some of the songs still flirt with blues clichés, but musically, Taylor cleverly finds enough of a twist on those tropes to surprise even to those who heard the album before.

However, Taylor can still rock when she wants to. Opening track ‘Can’t Keep Living Like This’ starts out sounding like it will turn into southern fried blues, but intensifies as it goes along. What also makes the song interesting is the fact that it seems to suggest towards a chorus that doesn’t really come, but it does not feel like it is lacking one. ‘Let It Burn’ and ‘Jump That Train’ are other excellent rockers built on powerful, yet not overly heavy riffs that would have fit alongside some of the better seventies rock records. Both tracks would be supersized on stage, but the somewhat more restrained versions on ‘Diamonds In The Dirt’ are surprisingly effective as well.

If you really want to hear Taylor’s class as a songwriter though, the soulful tracks will satisfy your curiosity. The title track has sort of a Robert Cray-ish soul blues groove and a surprisingly heartfelt set of lyrics about a relationship that turns out working better as a friendship. The main riff to ‘Who Do You Love?’ is nearly funky in a rocking kind of way and the simple, but very effective chorus brings some of the great female vocal groups of the sixties soul era to mind. On the more rootsy side, ‘Dead And Gone’ manages to convey a nice swampy groove without Taylor forcing herself to sound more American than she is.

While Taylor would improve even more as a songwriter on her subsequent albums, including my favorite album of hers, the wildly eclectic ‘Almost Always Never’, ‘Diamonds In The Dirt’ really is the starting point for Taylor as an excellent songwriter. She tends to get criticized for her lyrics, but I don’t find that much of a nuisance and I actually find them quite good at times. The only real criticism I have on ‘Diamonds In The Dirt’ is that ‘Lord Have Mercy’ needs to be saved by a fantastic guitar solo, but that really is a minor thing compared to the incredible amount of great music on the album.

Recommended tracks: ‘Jump That Train’, ‘Diamonds In The Dirt’, ‘Who Do You Love?’, ‘Can’t Keep Living Like This’