“To get to heaven you got to go through hell,” notes John Mooney on Big Ol’ Fiya’s first song. One can almost hear all the bromides about this being his reaction to Katrina in newsrooms around the world, but the fact is Mooney was hanging out at Piety Street Recording last year cutting these tracks before Katrina. Mooney hadn’t recorded in several years and he had a bagful of hair-raising blues tunes at hand, a great band augmented by the manic ministrations of Jon Cleary on keyboards and an engineer in Mark Bingham who knew how to make it all ring out with the clattering immediacy of a vintage Chess Records session.

“I got the blues in a different way,” Mooney declares, and his takes on love’s vicissitudes are indeed a graduate course in victimology. Like Muddy Waters, whose bone chilling mixture of tenderness, violence and voodoo were masterpieces of bottled passion, Mooney is not kidding around here. Somebody sliced him up inside and he sings about it with a desperation in his voice, which is strangely transcended by the redemptive glory of his golden slide guitar figures, the classic emotional equation of the blues that hurt so bad they make you laugh to keep from crying.

Mooney’s passion is the subject of the title track, a fire kindled by his “dream of you tonight” and stoked by the fiercely sensual demands of “Kiss Me.” The love that follows is an elemental force—a dense, steaming fog that envelops the relationship and dissipates to reveal… nothing.

All he can do is laugh about it and play on.

“Love is a funny thing / It cracks me up every time I lose again,” he sings in “U Keep Me (Hangin’ On).”

Not that Mooney sounds all that happy about it. His mournful wails and moonlight moans are as expressive as Muddy’s, or his mentor Ed “Son” House. In a session notable for great vocal performances, Mooney reaches the astral plane with his reading of Son’s “Louise McGhee,” another tale of spurned love. And on his “Do You Love Me?” Mooney asks his baby, “Do I see it in your eyes? / Or are you trying to say goodbye?”

Mooney’s vocals were all recorded live, giving an ambient sound to the backing tracks that crackles with energy and tiny resonant overtones and distortions. The rhythm tracks trace amazing textures through the African diaspora grooves of Professor Longhair’s percussionist, Alfred “Uganda” Roberts, drummer Raymond Weber (Bunche Johnson provides the second line beat on Grayson Capps’ “Drink A Little Poison”) and bassist Jeff Sarit.

Mooney’s guitar sound is live and pulsing vividly, an animate, feral presence that still flows across these tracks with the crisp, refreshing force of the draught beer pouring from the taps around the corner at Markey’s bar on a sunny Saints-game afternoon.

Drink in this irresistible potion once and you’ll demand it again.