Bex Marshall is a triple threat. She is a great songwriter, great singer and a guitar goddess. Her voice has a great tone that borrows from Janis and her guitar ability has drawn comparisons to Stevie Ray in the states and Rory Gallagher across the pond. While she is from England and lives in London, her influences are global. She has hitchhiked around the world and experienced a lifetime of adventures. This, along with her varied and many musical influences, give her the credibility to pull off the weary troubadour thing.
She often performs solo, just her and her guitar — no gimmicks. With Kitchen Table, her second and first U.S. release, she does a wonderful job of bringing the emotional empathy of her live shows to an album. That raw and real connection she creates between herself and an audience is electric. You can feel the pain or the joy of every note.
Right from the moment you press play you know you're in for something special.
The album opens with the title track, which sounds like it could be a lost Doors song. It calls for a return to the kitchen table, where families and friends sit, talk and connect. She then slows it down with "Red light," a cool, acoustic blues song you envision listening to on a porch, getting your feet stomping. It also shows off her guitar prowess. From there, she goes straight into a blue-grass/southern rock vibe before heading into another stand-out track, "Black Guitar."
She draws us in with a restrained voice and soft and rhythmic guitar to weave a tale of a man with a black guitar who "every night he drinks whatever he can afford, he takes a black guitar ... plays it for the Lord."
It perhaps speaks to her own connection with music and how personal music can be. On another impressive song, "Too much Rock and Roll," we can hear a riff very reminiscent of Rory Gallagher. But probably the best song on the album is "Little Bird." Lyrically it's stunning and vocally it's just as impressive. Bex really shows us just what she is capable of,
by toning down the raw power of her voice she almost sounds like a fragile little bird herself. With her deft handling of the subject matter she is able to turn loss into triumph. Its about how scary letting someone go can be and about how proud you are of them when they achieve. As a parent this message resonated with me.
Kitchen Table is the kind of timeless album that will be played many years. One of the most endearing aspects of this album is that it is almost like the musical equivalent of her diary. She writes songs that mean something to her and to all of us who listen. She is deserving of a much larger audience, but for now enjoy her as your little secret, but still don't hesitate to pass the word.

Rating: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars.

For more info go to: www.myspace.com/bexmarshall