of trance-boogie bluesmen such as T-Model Ford, Robert Cage and the late Junior Kimbrough. Guy covers their songs, taps into their sinister sound and rediscovers the world into which he was born in 1936, on a Louisiana sharecropper's farm. "I can't love like I used to," Guy sings, alone with his guitar on Kimbrough's "Done Got Old." The words are two steps from the grave, but the voice quivers with desire, and the album turns on this primordial tension between sex and death. The forbidding soundscapes comprise little more than one-chord drones and skeletal beats laid down by Ford's exquisitely elemental drummer, Spam. Guy roams over this spooky terrain like an outcast, wrenching notes from his guitar in fractured bursts and howling with anxiety on Davis' "She's Got the Devil in Her" and lust on Kimbrough's "I Gotta Try You Girl." It's a world full of temptation and cruelty, and on Sweet Tea, Buddy Guy's music once again sounds like it can't be satisfied. (RS 869 - May 24, 2001)

GREG KOT