Beth Hart: You Still Got Me (digital outlets)

When the big voiced blues-rock belter Beth Hart came to this country in 2000 on a promotional tour, we pushed her LA Song to the top of our charts, her first number one anywhere.

To be honest I don't remember the song that much but I certainly remember her.

As I said in my interview at the time, “On what felt like one of Auckland's most humid days of the year, Los Angeles-based singer Beth Hart was coiled on a couch in the lobby of the Sheraton, swathed in an enormous black woollen coat.

Gaunt and sporting a massive shoulder tat, the anorexically thin serial smoker cut a striking figure.”

Certainly fancy folk walking through the lobby turned and started, it was probably as close as many had come to someone who had clearly lived under needle.

At the time she was in recovery because of a life of drugs, disappointment, emotional damage, slogging it out through clubs and – a measure of her vocal power – playing Janis Joplin in an off-Broadway musical.

She's still had troubles but a decade ago released her exceptional, soul-baring Better Than Home album and delivered it at a terrific show at Auckland's Powerstation where she was in a buoyant mood.

When I interviewed her at that time, 15 years on from our first encounter, she was the same smart and articulate person but clearly in a much better place which she attributed to her husband, a faith and a diagnosis as bi-polar which allowed her to explain her predilections and previous behaviour.

It was good to hear and the Powerstation show proved she was much more in control of her life, muse and music.

Over the years she's recorded with Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck and notably with Joe Bonamassa, been nominated for numerous blues awards (won her share too) and her previous album was the powerful if pointlessly faithful A Tribute to Led Zeppelin.

This 11^th solo album – with guest guitarists Slash and Eric Gales – doesn't have Better Than Home's sustained emotional depth but she enjoys the click-clack Wanna Be Big Bad Johnny Cash (“and the whole damn world can kiss my arse”), cabaret narrative Never Underestimate a Girl, nasty Pimp Like That and the rock'n'roll blast of Savior with a Razor with Slash.

Although she can peel paint (Don't Call the Police), Hart's most affecting here on the blue ballads: Wonderful World, the personal Little Heartbreak Girl, the soulful and soaring You Still Got Me.

An uneven, intermittently impressive album and the final track might be a product description: Machine Gun Vibrato.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.