TheCapitalClinic

This is an update of a Review on Ben Miller, A Fuzz Treasure Trove, that I wrote last May:

Ben Miller has uploaded a treasure trove of songs at Fuzz. He describes his body of work as rock, jazz, blues, alternabluesrock, and progressive. Hey, baby, what more can you want. These songs rock! More on Ben and this space later.

It’s time for an update. I remember at about that time I was in correspondence with a real industry pro, Bill Bentley who had already identified Ben as an artist to watch, as reflected in BB’s review of Ben’s work:

author: Bill Bentley
Ben Miller, Strumming With The King (BMR) Talk about fighting the good fight. Musician Ben Miller took ten of his best original songs into the studio, playing all the lead, rhythm and bass guitars himself, then added drum parts to the vocal tracks and sent them out into the world. Even in a time that’s seen and heard just about everything, Strumming With The King still manages to catch afire. The mark of Mark Knopfler may be written in a deep groove on these songs, but Miller is and always will be his own man. His guitar has the relentless fire of so many greats, and while the young musician continues the search for his own sound, he’s found a musical path that will take him there with talent to spare. One to watch.

Ben Miller has the talent,and his new album is the strongest music he's made. Keep an eye on him.

I mentioned to BB and then to Ben that, to me, what might be described as his basic “Chicago Rock” [if such a description is really useful] with his instrumentation and take had a quality of “jump” which seemed to cause a double-take in both of them; but I thought later that, hey, why not say it was so. “Ben Miller jumps!”

Ben Miller’s stated sources of inspiration range from notable quitarists such as Mark Knopfler [you can note the fingerpicking] and path-breaking icons like Bob Dylan. And there are echoes of Elvis and, to me, Johnny Cash’s whiskey and smoke in Ben voice as well - not a bad collection to lean on as one moves on to find one’s own distinctive voice.

An intriguing question that occurs to me now, and perhaps it is an unfair one is: Does Ben’s powerful guitar, sometimes finger-picking, sometime raging, go with his voice or does his voice and lyrics stretching for yet some more, go with his guitar? Maybe it doesn’t matter since it all comes together and jumps. Let’s see where this all goes.

NB: a note to readers of my reviews: the text of my reviews at this site may change from time to time. As I listen for futher nuances in a song or body of work, I keep modifying or adding to my thoughts, making my reviews an organic "moveable feast". Since Fuzz artists are constantly evolving, as are our own perspectives, I think Fuzz reviews should not be frozen in time. It's time to extend the power of real-time, web-based music discovery, by making our reviews, "wiki-reviews."