Blacklight Sonatas

The great webzine Metal Temple writes about Michael Lee Firkins' 2007 Blacklight Sonatas CD, "It's an instrumental album with a lot of blues guitar and a cover of Ram Jam's "Black Betty", with Michael Lee Firkins testing his vocal abilities once more. This is the only dark moment in Blacklight Sonatas that mainly has some nice blues vibe, a lot of good guitar moments and nice mixing work in the studio. The stereo panning of the guitars is a little bit hard, with two guitars shredding at the same time at your left and right speaker with the rhythm section in the middle. The best moment is the album's title track; a sad guitar is bleeding with a bottleneck sliding to a classical music scale and a brokenhearted almost mournful melody with a glimpse of light inside. A nice compilation of blues, country riffs and solos and with a nice selection of musicians that wade in, like Thomas Pridgen, Chuck Leavell, Michael Bland and more, Blacklight Sonatas is the perfect listening exercise for guitarists that want to play the music that Michael Lee Firkins knows very well."