Lisa Mills: Tempered In Fire

Lisa Mills is best known as a blues singer-songwriter in Europe and from Austin east to Florida, where she works a regular circuit of clubs and festivals across the Gulf Coast states. But if she keeps making records as stirring as Tempered In Fire, more of the world beyond the south is going to know her as a singer as versatile as she is soulful. Mills cedes nothing to anyone when it comes to belting hard, stomping blues (her own “My Happy Song”); moaning a heartbreaking southern soul lament (the wrenching “Tennessee Tears”); gently caressing a bluesy saloon song (“Tempered in Fire”) with a soft, probing touch worthy of her idol, Etta James; getting downright torchy, accompanied only by her own spare, plaintive guitar, on Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine,” so deeply yearning and smoldering it’ll make a fellow weak in the knees; or rising from a whisper to a gut-wrenching howl in “Someone Very Close,” an epic (6:28), tense, densely textured “j’accuse” rocker with a subtle O. Henry twist. The sonics are lively and dynamic, the better to keep Mills’ vocals in your face and warming your soul.