Following his nomination for 'Best Live Act' at 2008's Mojo Awards and winning the 'Best Breakthrough Act' in 2007, this is third full-length studio album from Seasick Steve. Taught to play guitar by the highly respected blues guitarist K.C. Douglas and famous for playing his 3 stringed guitar and stamping on a wooden box he calls the 'Mississippi Drum Machine', Seasick Steve's up-tempo blues has proved a surprise hit in the UK.

Sep 2008

The question that stalks 'I Started Out With Nothin'...is how much of that visceral, unvarnished power will remain under the auspices of a major record label. The songs still largely draw on Wold's former life as a vagrant - Walking Man, on which he offers to "stash my sleeping roll under your bed", deals with a topic that might technically be termed hobo sexuality - but it's an album made under vastly different circumstances to its predecessor.

That album, Dog House Blues, was apparently recorded direct to one track in Wold's kitchen using a 1930s microphone. I Started Out With Nothing...was recorded in a plush residential studio owned by former Darkness guitarist Dan Hawkins. Can your music still carry the dusty tang of the trainyard when it comes complete with contributions from Ruby Murray, backing vocalist by appointment to Mick Jagger, Steve Winwood and Newcastle's own boxcar-hopping vagabond minstrel Bryan Ferry?

The opener, the album's title track, suggests not. With its smooth guitars and surfeit of female vocals, it sounds like something designed with local radio - or indeed our old pal StefanPriceUK - in mind: a depressingly neutered take on Wold's sound. But it seems to exist solely as bait for the less adventurous listener: you can decry the cynicism, but you can't help being delighted when the album swiftly rectifies itself. The solitary star guest, Nick Cave, turns in a brilliantly restrained performance on Just Like a King, which is alternately brooding, lascivious and hilarious: "I'm a prizefighter baby, when I step inside your ring." There are moments when the pace lets up to reveal a softer tone to Wold's voice - Happy Man is a particularly lovely example - but the most immediate excitement is generated when he lets rip, as on Thunderbird or the effortlessly funky St Louis Slim, a song in which the protagonist manages to lose a leg in the first line. Chiggers, a title that sounds like a South African-accented tribute to Liverpool's most irrepressible TV presenter but turns out to refer to an insect, is equally thrilling, decorated with ferocious slide guitar. It is most emphatically not Chiggers Plays Pop.

If you were minded to pose awkward questions, you might ask precisely how many albums of hobo-themed blues rock a man needs. It's an issue Wold himself has addressed, calling his current fame "a job for a little while". But he may also have an answer, in the shape of the closing My Youth. A desolate mediation on ageing, it's the best thing here, and there's not a hint of the dusty tracks about it. "I've still got my memories," he sings, but it's a song that suggests Seasick Steve's appeal might last even when the public tire of hearing about them. - The Guardian ****

An appearance on Jools Holland's 2006 Hootenanny New Year's Eve TV show catapulted this veteran American country bluesman into the limelight. After decades of transient employment, travelling and performing Seasick Steve's debut album CHEAP, released on Scandinavian independent, was only released in 2006. Following the Jools' show slot his profile has risen rapidly, one man band (guitar and Mississippi drum machineà) Steve won Mojo magazine's award for the Best Breakthrough Act in 2007, appeared at numerous festivals and secured a contract with Warner Music in 2008.