Already Free: From Here, It Has To Be To The Top For Derek Trucks

If Derek Trucks isn't the greatest guitar player alive today, he's in the top five. And the other four are old enough to be Trucks' father.

Fading in on Trucks' gentle acoustic strumming along, "Down in the Flood" quickly gets funky with percussive stomping, an overdriven electric guitar, a burbling clavinet and, finally, the rough-hewn vocals of vocalist Mike Mattison. As if on cue, a driving rhythm section and B-3 kick in, taking the song to a whole other level, with Derek showing just how he got on Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists list at the age of 24. The horns and pianos come in, Trucks adds what seems like a Spectorian wall of sound and you realize something: this is going to be a good album.

From there we get the rest of Already Free, the sixth studio album by the band fronted by the child prodigy who has played alongside the Allman Brothers Band, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and The Band. The group, known for tackling Stevie Wonder alongside John Coltrane, Lightnin' Hopkins alongside Toots Hibbert and Ray Charles alongside Herbie Hancock bring eight originals and four covers to the table. After three consecutive releases where covers dominated, it is nice to see the group offer up a sizable chunk of original material. While "Down in the Flood", a cover, may be the most accessible track for the masses, the originals are certainly as great as the covers, owing the the nature of the group. This band can make anything their own, but it's nice that the sixth time around that they haven't.

I won't go into any in-depth analysis, you can do that on your own. Personal highlights include the soulful "Down Don't Bother Me", the gospel-tinged cover of the Oldham-Penn staple "Sweet Inspiration" (with Trucks on drums), the fatback blues "Don't Miss Me", the eastern-flavored "Back Where I Started" (with Trucks' wife, Susan Tedeschi, taking the lead vocal) and the title track, a simple, timeless track whose lyrics evoke a bygone era, complete with 78 rpm effects.

The album has a timeless quality, it's not tied to any specific date, especially not 2009. At times, you wonder just what you're listening to. There's gospel, blues, soul, rock and more, easy categorization has never been something that was a staple of the group. The album's more of an ensemble affair, though Trucks clearly asserts himself as the leader. Packed with family and friends on top of the band, the album is truly a homespun affair, recorded at Trucks' own Swamp Raga Studios in Jacksonville, Florida and produced by Trucks himself.

There are a few drawbacks to the release, perhaps the biggest being the fact that there are four different editions of the album, the standard release (12 tracks), the Best Buy exclusive (15 tracks), the iTunes exclusive (13 tracks) and the to-be-released Japanese release (14 tracks). This is most certainly a sign of the ascendancy of Trucks into the mainstream, albeit at the edges. And personally, I feel that the two tracks sung by Doyle Bramhall, Trucks' fellow guitar slinger on recent tours alongside Clapton, could have been more soulfully interpreted by Mattison, though they are still fine tracks. The fact that "Long Time Man", a bonus track on the Best Buy edition, didn't make it onto the album is a slight disappointment.

But, still, the positives far outweigh the negatives this time around. The Derek Trucks Band have just released their sixth studio album. If you have even a passing interest in music, you should certainly pick up Already Free.