Junior Kimbrough's death in 1998 left a howling void in American blues music. GOD KNOWS I TRIED, Kimbrough's fourth Fat Possum recording and his first posthumous release, highlights the magnitude of the loss. Kimbrough single-handedly invented his own blues style, a mixture of hard-edged instrumentation, conversational, ghost-touched vocals, and, unique to the North Mississippi hill country, the looping, hypnotic guitar riffs which he plays through mild, fluid distortion, giving the whole a pulsing, dream-like quality.

Kimbrough's style also relies heavily on improvisation, so the song structures seem to progress intuitively, as on the spooky "You're Gonna Find Your Mistake" with its meandering rhythm guitar and field-holler vocals. True to the essence of blues, Kimbrough's music sounds like it's trying to rein in chaos--with varying degrees of success, as the darkly driving instrumental "All Night Long" and the close-to-the-edge "How Do You Feel" both demonstrate. For blues fans frustrated with sorting through the products of watered down impostors, GOD KNOWS I TRIED is a pure shot of the real thing.