First impression after listenening to both CDs straight through once:
Great production quality. Period. Sound is wonderful, and I absolutely adore the rawer feeling on some of the tracks. (Looks like Mark has picked up a few pointers mentioned on Guy's forum over the years.) Not a lot of guitar playing, but more than on Get Lucky. Quite standard fare for Mark, I'd say. No surprises.
As for the songs, I have no particular favorite yet, but the slower ones seem to be the stronger ones. Go Love and Seattle are stunning. The upbeat ones are basically variations of blues songs, and while I love blues, they feel a bit out of place and somewhat contrived. Mark has obviously roots in the blues, but he's no blues singer, and it's a bit embarrassing when he tries to sound more American than the Americans with "Baby, am I hat or wat". The blues numbers tend to sound very similar, and in my opinion they could have been reduced to one or two tracks. There are simply too many of them.
Which brings me to another thing: I've mentioned it earlier, but I strongly believe the album would have benefited from being reduced to one killer CD OR that the songs would have been ordered thematically/stylistically on each CD. Now it's like one big hodge podge of (good and some great songs) that tend to blend into some unidentifable mass. Too much of a good thing is not always a good thing.
All in all, I think it's a very good album, it definitely deservers many listens and I believe many songs will grow on me and become favorites down the line. There's plenty of material to elaborate on to create a killer concert setlist, that's for sure. Definitely time to ditch some of the staples.
