CHRISTINA CARTER "Texas Working Blues" (Blackest Rainbow)

I'm fucking floored that after this many years of non-stop music-making Christina Carter can still sit down in a wooden chair, put her hands around an electric guitar, and free-associate fresh arrangements of notes and chords and lyrics and solos and not be bored shitless. Right? I mean, I guess if you multiply six strings by, what, 21-or-so fret positions per string, and then you have to multiply that by something else, because of all the barre chords and open positions and fingerpicking possibilities like that....well, once you start doing the math the number of potential jams to bust on an electric guitar is pretty endless I suppose. But still. The point is that Christina's earliest East Texas loner blues came drifting into the cosmos a long, long time ago ('91-ish?), and here she is, 2008, and "Texas Working Blues" is easily as bewitching and beatific a set of songs as she's ever recorded in her entire life. Stunning and simple ballads of the heart and soul, layered in electric grace, lost on the plains, lying in the dirt, staring at the stars, etc.