Welcome

Step across the "Welcome" mat and prepare for swampy, high-fever Texas blues rock -- with a smoldering, erotic undercurrent. Doyle Bramhall II & Smokestack cast an unbreakable spell with the group's new "Welcome" album, which is near-torrid in its ardent intensity.

Smokestack, Bramhall's band, is a compact, strong-willed squad with a fastidious sense of phrasing and tone but a dramatic elasticity in the structure of its songs. Bassist Chris Bruce and drummer J.J. Johnson pace the music with elongated textures that snap back into form with startling precision. Second guitarist Craig Ross also shines as a guest asset on the record. Meanwhile, Bramhall's wife and backup singer Susannah Melvoin's voice rides under and between the rhythms and the emotional diction of Doyle's left-handed '64 sunburst Strat as if it were an exhortatory horn section. The music is muscular but deliriously lithe in its hungry sexuality, and it builds to a hoof-pounding charge like a bull in heat.

"Green Light Girl" is the album's initial single. Co-authored by Bramhall and Melvoin, the song is about a wishfully wanton young woman on the prowl: "Too hot to handle now/Spend all night/In a red light town/Looking for a green light." Gloriously aroused rockers like "Soul Shaker" seldom makes it onto recordings with the nostril-flaring gusto heard on "Welcome." And on the cut named for the group, the combustible "Smokestack," you get a furnace's worth of shifting warmth and stinging fumes.