The Bright Lights

Precocious young guitarist Gary Clark Jr. graduated from Austin’s venerable juke joint circuit with the release of the *Bright Lights EP*, a tantalizingly brief four-track release for Warner Brothers that matches two hard charging, muscular blues rock workouts with a pair of understated acoustic recordings. Before the *Bright Lights* release Clark was best known for his star turn as an itinerant bluesman in John Sayle’s 2007 film *Honeydripper*, an imaginative reconstruction of the moment when Texas blues was transformed by the introduction of the electric guitar. Clark effectively channels the spirit of *Honeydripper*’s post-war blues milieu on *Bright Lights*’ title track, which devilishly borrows the central refrain of Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City” and yokes it to a crushingly distorted guitar riff that could easily have been conceived by latter day punk-blues darlings like Jack White or Dan Auerbach. It is Clark’s repeatedly demonstrated ability to effortlessly execute such unaffected fusions of contemporary influences and classic blues tropes that makes *Bright Lights* such a compelling listen.