John Mayall with Eric Clapton - Blues Breakers (1966), 4/10

The group now featuring Eric Clapton on guitar plays a collection of blues standards and does a decent enough job of covering these tracks with good energy and excellent technical execution. Unfortunately, Mayall’s vocals are incredibly weak compared to the original artists and while Clapton’s performances exhibit solid proficiency, they already foreshadow his inconsistent ability to convey feeling outside of already charged compositions. The simple way to look at it is these songs had been and would be played much better than they are here. Particularly such a strong song such as Robert Johnson’s “Ramblin’ on My Mind” is practically botched by Clapton, proving that the project is a misguided attempt at recreating better music. It further proves that technical prowess does not yield artistic merit, especially when it comes to the blues that relies so heavily on genuine emotion through performance, something that artists like Clapton, and many others who bastardized the genre, struggle with consistently. Mayall’s vocals, in comparison, are a matter of taste but rarely provide anything moving, again especially in comparison to some of the source material they use in conjunction with Mayall’s material. So once things get going, the album is just another example of an unnecessary stylistic tangent stemming from an originally pure genre, especially considering its complete lack of vulnerability or originality.