Slated for blue binning after a thumbs down review from my favorite online album critic (George Starostin), B.B. King's Guess Who became the subject of unexpected controversy in my household when my girlfriend told me that she had randomly played it and loved it and I immediately responded back with a link to Starostin's negative review. Not fair, perhaps, but I really do agree with Starostin a rather large percentage of the time and indeed, my fondness of his reviews no doubt has a lot to do with the fact that we share similar musical philosophies and tastes.
And the most important musical philosophy we share is to actually listen to the record instead of judging it ahead of time (sounds obvious, but I have long suspected that allmusic.com and Rolling Stone do not always follow this principle). So much as I'd like to steal my friend Jonathan's witty pun about B.B. King standing for 'Blue Bin King' (okay, I already did steal it), I will be keeping this record, not that I wouldn't be anyways even if I hated it. My feeling, for what it's worth, is that G. Star. has a point regarding the fact that there is not a whole lot of guitar played on the record with the arrangements instead dominated by strings and horns. That's not to say that strings and horns are inherently a worse choice, but they are much less distinctive than when King brings out his trusted Lucille. But King is a good enough singer to make up for it, and when he does play guitar, he soars. Still, I will defend Starostin, as I could certainly see that in the midst of reviewing 44 B.B. King albums, this one probably wouldn't stand out.
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