Even though she’s only five feet tall, Ruth LaMaster’s powerful singing and conviction bear witness to her stage name: Hurricane Ruth. 

From the small city of Beardstown, Illinois, LaMaster grew up at her parents’ business, a tavern that hosted Sunday jam sessions. Influenced by Bessie Smith, Ray Charles, Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald, LaMaster began singing in high school. She moved away the latter great artists, choosing the hard, blues-rock sound that dominates her fifth album, Good Life. 

LaMaster sets the project’s hell-yeah tone with “Like Wildfire,” an unbridled scorcher that’s far more arena rock than blues. Despite its title, “Dirty Blues,” one of two Good Life songs LaMaster co-wrote with Buddy Guy’s Grammy-winning producer, Tom Hambridge, follows the same loud, hard-rock route. Her other Hambridge collaboration, “What You Never Had,” is a lively juke-joint blues number featuring Bruce Katz’s Hammond B3 organ. 

Despite some variety in Good Life—including the album’s minor-key blues ballad title song—its high-caliber and high-energy performances deliver but can’t inject freshness into such well-trodden territory. Stylistically, most of this has been heard many, many times before. But the concluding song, “I’ve Got Your Back,” thankfully abandons that over-familiarity. One of the two Good Life songs not co-written by LaMaster, this soulful, keyboard-based ballad presents a revelatory new aspect of the singer, possibly worth further pursuit.