image courtesy of BANDR Music

Album Review of Guy Verlinde & Tom Eylenbosch: Promised Land Blues

Guy Verlinde (vocals, guitars, percussion, and broom) and Tom Eylenbosch (backing vocals, piano, banjo, and washboard) were the 2024 Belgian Blues Award winners for Best Duo in 2024. That’s no surprise, as Promised Land Blues is attention-grabbing from the very start. It’s clear that these two are a couple of Belgium’s best blues artists, with a varied, full sound, delivery that pops, and Verlinde’s deep, strong blues voice. The piano playing of Eylenbosch, meanwhile, can range from soulful to energetic to impressively frenetic ivory-tickling.

The album opens with “Heaven Inside My Head,” a song that sounds as if it’s straight from a N’awlins blues joint. It’s a steady-paced blues dirge whose straightforward progression is augmented by a gritty, almost growling vocal from Verlinde and nifty flourishes on the piano from Eylenbosch. Beginning to end, Promised Land Blues songs run the gamut from almost Gospel (“You Gotta Move”) to energetic (“Do That Boogie”) to soulful (album-ender “World Goin’ Wrong”) to haunting (“Gotta Let Go”).

Verlinde and Eylenbosch are joined by other top European blues artists on several songs. For example, “A Worried Man Blues” is one of the three songs on this disc where the headline duo is joined by Steven Troch on harmonica, providing harmonica-work that appears prominently, changing the musical mix.

Finally, one more song worth noting is “Reckonin’ Blues,” a song that chugs along like a freight train, addressing environmental concerns, with a neat little lyric about climate change that includes “a whole more thunderstrucks, now,” after which Verlinde riffs on the relevant AC/DC guitar hook a bit right before the song’s close.

So, if you’re not familiar with Guy Verlinde and Tom Eylenbosch, Promised Land Blues is a solid introduction to a pair of top bluesmen.