Precious Little Review Chicago Sun Times, 4 Stars

One week after losing Syd Barrett, the music world is treated to this comeback album by another famous British rock dropout, Jeremy Spencer. The Fleetwood Mac guitarist, whose virtuoso slide work was featured on the classic LPs "Then Play On" and "Kiln House," has seldom been heard from since leaving the group in 1971.

Spencer says God told him to do the Notodden Blues Festival in Norway in August 2005, although the man upstairs failed to supply his dream lineup of Chicago blues survivors such as Pinetop Perkins and Hubert Sumlin. Nonetheless, the Norwegian musicians who backed Spencer for the gig were plenty good enough to take into a studio in Oslo, where they recorded this disc of seven Spencer originals and five traditional tunes.

The reclusive guitarist clearly had been developing this material for years. There's "Serene Serena," a takeoff on the traditional "Corrina Corrina" about a girl that Spencer sees as a Florence Nightingale type in Bosnia, and "Maria de Santiago," the melody for which came to Spencer during a visit to Mexico. And "Please Don't Stop" continues a Spencer tradition of reinventing Fabian material. This is pure, unadulterated, mostly acoustic blues straight from the heart of an artist whose return is so welcome, and so needed.

Jeff Johnson