Dave Perkins’ musical career has involved working with artists like Vassar Clements, Jerry Jeff Walker, Carole King, Guy Clark, Chagall Guevara, Papa John Creach, Ray Charles, Mystic Meditations, and Passafist. You name it, he’s played it. His latest solo effort, Pistol City Holiness (Lugnut Music), is a superlative blues/rock effort that will knock you for a loop.

If you’re a blues/rock fan and the opening cut, “Break,” doesn’t pull you in, then the blistering remake of Freddie King’s “Goin’ Down,” should do the trick. The following cut, “Cherryfish and Chicken,” is a scorching instrumental that features Perkins with Reese Wynans on keyboards and a torrid rhythm section. I don’t think I’m going to have enough adjectives for hot to adequately complete this review, but that’s the only words that can describe cuts like the ones listed above and tracks like “Train at Night” and “Tiger Texas.”

Perkins also proves to be a songwriter that can touch on blues themes both old and new, such as “Long Eleven Road,” about a family facing unemployment woes, songs with unique outlooks on relationships (“Flown” and “Bottles and Knives”), and new twists on traditional blues, like “Devil’s Game,” featuring Perkins’ searing slide guitar with Jimmy Nalls on acoustic guitar. “Preacher Blues” tackles a longtime blues theme, the Ladies Man posing as a man of God.

This is blues/rock at its most manic and primal. Perkins sounds like he’s about to shred his guitar strings (not to mention his vocal chords). Harp player T J Klay threatens to blow the back off his harmonica, and the rhythm section (featuring several different bass players and drummers) are incredible.

In short, if you’re a blues/rock fan at all, you absolutely need to have this disc. You will play it over and over again and it will still knock you for a loop every time. This is easily the surprise disc of 2009 so far.