****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Buy the catalog, load her personal appearance and tour schedule into your calendar and bookmark her website as a favorite--Beth Hart is, and will go down as, among the genuinely incomparable artists and performers to touch those fortunate enough to enjoy, appreciate and be moved by them. Her body of work is growing, progressing and demonstrating increasing diversity, but is uniformly unique among vocal talent and singer/songwriters today and historically. I've read the attempts to compare her, and in every attempt I find she remains incomparable.She is indeed mature, and her work and her delivery reflect a life lived through and at times in triumph over adversity, together with genuine reflection upon her experiences, feelings and thoughts. It is among the ironies that through riffs, runs, driving strains and complex arrangements seeming to accommodate her own extemporized expressions the result is elegant, and, while she clearly makes wry self-observations in titles referencing screaming for her supper, her output is thoughtful and more often than not is readily appreciable as such. Her original work reflects depth and her covers radiate soulful, wrenching and original interpretation--her earlier cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds exemplifies her ability to render projects by brilliant and creative artists when originally released and performed into something entirely fresh and newly envisioned through her own interpretation and delivery. Ms. Hart, alternately offers up-tempo hard driving creations that are, honestly, plain fun and a joy to experience; and, wrenching blues that, as others have observed, demonstrate the capacity to bring great emotion in response, to the point of tears. In short, Beth Hart does what an artist at her best is capable of doing in interaction with an audience, and she does it with a style and richness in her art that can leave the listener experiencing a certain level of awe of the woman's craft.I have real appreciation for a wide range of music ranging from classical to alt and classic country, to jazz and blues and metal. I really enjoy sampling new artists and new work by established artists, and as I try one new experience after another from among uniformly solid talents, as my play mode moves from loading an entire new album or group of songs back to shuffle from among the library of recent additions, I find I am almost jerked out of otherwise complacent listening to the items playing in order, wondering, "Who is that?", again and again, only to realize almost immediately, "Of course--it's Beth Hart." Having listened to Better Than Home through and through, I did in fact buy Ms. Hart's catalog and am consistently impressed, pleased, and reenergized by each and every one of her tracks and live performances. Comparisons to Janis Joplin and the litany of others for whom comparison is offered in these reviews is inevitable, but runs the danger of damning by faint praise in comparison to Ms. Hart in her own right. And I love Janis Joplin. We could mention others, from Sarah Vaughn to Etta James, as somehow pointing to the quality Ms. Hart represents, and we would be selling her short. Her complexity and breadth of talent in composition, lyrics, performance and range defies comparison, and would be unfair to the legacy of those other greats we might be thinking of, but in any event must be positive.Better than Home is a fantastic start, but does not represent a terminus (I feel sure) nor anything approaching a static example of her work. Virtually every song she chooses presents its own unique opportunity for her to treat us with her talents, and for variations in delivery. Beth Hart is among those artists who justify the urge to sneak unauthorized recording equipment into every live performance you could attend and bootleg her every note, because you know that, once transferred to reel-to-reel you could listen to one performance after the other, of the same song, back-to-back and enjoy and compare and marvel at her trills, choruses, improvisations and inflections and perhaps never get bored. Working backward from Better Than Home to her earlier releases brings happy surprises and wonder at every turn, and working outward to her collaborations reinforces her flexibility and the fact that she can work with different bands, artists and material in ways that may be departures from her roots and remain a delight to experience.I hope she will indeed always "have a song". I feel like I'll always want to listen and enjoy what she offers her audiences. You cannot go wrong--she's a tour de force and more than a listen. She's as much and maybe more, as Hendrix, an Experience.
