Having followed his career from his 1995 studio album Exception To The Rule it has never been hard believing in Tommy Castro. This is a musician renowned for sheer hard gigging that has seen him put out literally thousands of high energy live performances and release thirteen albums.
This undoubted dedication to his craft was finally recognised in 2008 when he won the Blues Music Entertainer Of The Year Award.
Since then, he has signed to Alligator Records and has just released his debut album for them, Hard Believer. When Tommy said to Guitar Magazine, “if there’s no groove there, I can’t sink my teeth into it,” he all but revealed the key to his success. For Hard Believer he carves grooves that run as deep as a canyon.
The album is a glorious romp through a host of soul-shaking, groove-driven, and simply smoking tracks. All of this is further enriched by crashing waves of funk drenched southern soul and streetwise touches of big city blues. Castro’s passionate, and soulful vocals and his exhilarating incendiary guitar bursts run like a seam of gems throughout solid rock.
It is performances like this that have made him one of the hottest names on the circuit and his gigs worthy of crawling to on your hands and knees. The incredible surge of adrenalin experienced at one of his live shows is superbly captured and nicely bottled on the album by producer John Porter of B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Elvis Costello, and Otis Rush fame, among others.
His smoldering guitar fires out short bursts of sparks that somehow never detract from the underlying groove and are never overstated. The music is the star and Castro knows exactly how to deliver a high energy groove to the highest possible quality.
It’s that word 'quality' that sums up his career to date through albums such as the late nineties pair of Right As Rain, and Can’t Keep A Good Man Down. The new millennium saw him blaze a trail with Guilty Of Love, and Soul Shaker, an album that acts as the perfect introduction to this latest release.
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