Steak is good, and bleu cheese, mushrooms and sautéed onions are all good on a steak, but you don’t want them all on it at once. Stack enough stuff on top and the steak gets lost, and to some extent, that’s the story of From the Reach. You have the perfectly fine guitar playing of Sonny Landreth backed by drums and bass and organ and percussionists and a host of guest artists—Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Dr. John, Jimmy Buffett and more. The extra players turn a speedboat of a trio into a tanker with a quarter-mile turning radius, and for no appreciable improvement. I’m sure it was fun to play with these musicians, but as good as they are, their sounds are more conventional that Landreth’s truly electric guitar, making the CD more conventional as well.

The album starts with the song “Blue Tarp Blues” and the line “Air Force One had a heck of a view.”—a reminder of how smart and idiosyncratic Landreth can be. That sort of touch, whether lyrically or on guitar, is him at his best, and while everything here is fine, nothing is as special as he can be.