@apartofhim's Top 20 of 2014 - #14 Vic Ruggiero "THIS"

By far THIS is Ruggiero's best solo work. He's a modern-day singer of a culture ever struggling.

Here's what Paste Magazine's Patrick Flanary had to say about THIS:

The critic Robert Palmer once wrote that blues is “something of a gumbo”; the same can be said of Ruggiero’s one-man show. He sings of trust and paranoia, love and war, senility and surveillance—often in the same song. And, just as seamlessly, he rolls from covering Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City” and The Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb” to his own rockabilly, soul, punk-folk, and boogie-woogie originals. “He’s a throwback, he’s really cut from a classic cloth,” Ara Babajian, The Slackers’ drummer since 2002, told me from a tour stop in San Francisco. “He inhabits the dark space between the notes, the place where all the swing and magic happens.” 

Read the rest at Paste Magazine.