If there is an artist within the Blues-Rock industry in the United States able to be completely honest and truthful to himself, his music and to all his thousands of fans worldwide, that artist is most certainly the American Blues-Rock Titan, Guitar Supremo and singer-songwriter Walter Trout.
Throughout his whole career, might that have been as a solo artist or with Canned Heat or Bluesbreakers, there has always been something completely genuine and real about Trout’s music, no matter whether that was expressed through a guitar solo or the American artist's powerful vocal range, even in what sometimes Trout Himself calls "The Wild Days", referring to a time of his career where this prodigious Guitar Titan was still very successful but not exactly living a very morigerate life.
But his loyal fans always supported him, through good and bad times and they still do so now, because they could see and feel not only Trout’s enormous artistic talent, but also the raw passion and emotional depth that Trout is able to emit on and off a stage or when he releases a new record.
Trout is also one of those very rare and gifted artist that, through the years, keeps on growing sonically, as testified, especially in the last two decades, by stellar albums like Full Circle (2006), The Outsider (2008), Blues For The Modern Daze (2012), Battle Scars (2015) and his latest studio album to date Broken (2024), among others, records where the American Guitar Maestro was able not only to reinstate his status again and again as one of the greatest Blues-Rock artists of the last half a century, but where he could also flex his musical and compositional muscles in more diverse genres, like Acoustic Blues, Hard-Rock and Boogie, just to mention a few.
Now, with a new album soon to be released and called Sign Of The Times, this 74-years-old Blues-Rock lion shows once again clear signs of not wanting to slow down anytime soon, by expressing an even more robust and corpulent guitar playing style of the finest level and pairing it with astonishingly powerful vocal deliveries throughout the 10 original songs included in Trout’s new offer.
What transpires immediately, as the album kicks off with a booming rocking tune despising Artificial Intelligence called, aptly, Artificial, is that Trout doesn't pull any punches at all, when touching on contemporary topics that are dragging the world, willingly, in a divisory state, such as politic, advanced technology and increasing isolation, all themes that might have possibly ignited the reason behind Trout’s new album title.
Lyrically, Sign Of The Times sees the American Blues-Rock Titan collaborating with his wife and manager Marie once again, a collaboration that has worked rather splendidly in some of Trout’s recent albums, where husband and wife seem to work in perfect symbiosis more and more on each passing album, as proven once again on Sign Of The Times.
From a musical aspect, Sign Of The Times is, in our personal opinion, a record where Trout comes across as the freest as he has ever sounded in recent years, with the American artist acquiring a more diverse sonic morphology to his trademark sound whilst showing that, when it comes to Blues-Rock, he is still one of the biggest bad-asses guitar players around.
One of the most enriching assets in Trout’s great musical army, it's his capacity to create "waves" on each of his records (and Sign Of The Times is no exception), intended as a way to alternate songs containing challenging (and often tough ones for Trout on a personal level) topics to sing about with others containing more hopeful messages of love, hope and gratitude to life, something that Walter Trout does incredibly well on his new album too.
Trout’s studio musicians work in such organic way, on Sign Of The Times and provide a stunning level of musicianship; John Avila on bass is metronomically impeccable, Michael Leasure on drums is pure power and precision, while Teddy Andreadis does once again a magnificent work on keyboards, completing a stellar line-up of musicians.
At the centre of it all, of course, there is Walter Trout; at 74 years of age and 32 albums on his belt, the singer-songwriter and Guitar Maestro delivers a record of extraordinary intensity, with stunning vocal deliveries (try, among others, songs like I Remember, Struggle To Believe or Blood On My Pillow) and an impressively ferocious guitar playing, especially on tracks such as the album's title-track, No Strings Attached and Struggle To Believe, just to mention a few.
Moreover, Walter Trout shows that he can sound extraordinarily convincing also when he steps into Southern Rock (Hurt No More, I Remember), Traditional Blues (Too Bad, Hi-Tech Woman) or Acoustic Folk (Mona Lisa Smile), because he understands exactly which type of arrangement may suit a certain tune without "having" to be performed in a Blues-Rock form and still sounding, inequivocably, a Walter Trout song, something that not many artists are able to achieve, in these days and age.
Sign Of The Times is the kind of record that every respectable fan would love to hear from their Blues-Rock Music Heroes; packed with all original songs, beautifully written, played and sang from beginning to end, Walter Trout’s new album is a triumph of musicianship and the living proof that even at 74, an artist can produce one of the very best records ever released in his remarkable career.
Walter Trout has done it again...
Sign Of The Times is due to be released on 5th September 2025 and it is available to be purchased via Mascot Label Group/Provogue .
