On Saints & Sinners, Johnny Winter has retained the essentials of his blues style. But they now appear in many more situations than in the past, giving this LP greater breadth than any of its predecessors. His brother Edgar has achieved enormous commercial success doing something very similar—he was less rooted in blues to begin with—and may have served as a model for Winter’s new direction. So has their mutual producer, Rick Derringer, who may be responsible for the tightness of the arrangements, crispness of the recording, and heavy-metal feeling that asserts itself even on straight blues numbers.
Winter’s manic guitar is there in all its glory, churning out solo after solo, many of them explosive in the old Hendrix tradition, a few excessive and repetitive in a way that has marred past work. But Winter doesn’t just burn his way through rock standards—most notably "Riot in Cell Block No. 9" and a "Thirty Days" which not only does justice to Chuck Berry’s song, but to his arrangement and the recording sound of the old Chess studios as well.
Winter also uses modern blues as fodder for his emerging cross between blues and heaviness. On Allen Toussaint’s "Blinded By Love," he and Derringer do some joint guitar work that produces as much of an English metal feeling as I ever expected to hear from the Texas master. The use of an Arp helps to give the cut its very modern feeling. He gets the same feeling on the fully arranged Van Morrison song, "Feedback on Highway 101" and on his own straight "Bad Luck Situation." On all these cuts his band shows extraordinary precision.
"Stone County" and "Rollin’ Cross the Country," the lead-off tracks for each side, use strong keyboards, backing vocals and frenzied tempi. At the opposite extreme is his soul ballad "Hurtin’ So Bad," which is reminiscent of some of his brother’s beautiful work in the genre. It breaks up the second side perfectly at the same time that it underlines the major flaw in the album.
Both Winter’s music and voice are abrasive. He rarely concerns himself with nuance and so his work continues to be best appreciated in small doses. But songs like "Hurtin’ So Bad" broaden the emotional range of his work. If he continues to explore the genre his future LPs may achieve the emotional depth and balance that even Saints & Sinners lacks. But that important reservation notwithstanding, Saints & Sinners is not only Winter’s best album, but a fine rocker—in fact, one of the very few recently released I expect to come back to. (RS 156)
JON LANDAU