There have been plenty of posthumous
Jeff Healey releases, but 2013's
House on Fire: Demos and Rarities excavates unheard material from the prime of the
Jeff Healey Band: the years of 1992 and 1998, when
Healey was signed to a major label and regularly made the album rock charts.
Healey's biggest hits arrived right at the turn of the '90s -- "Angel Eyes," his only Billboard Top 10 or Top 40 hit, appeared in 1989 -- and by the time
Feel This appeared in 1992, his chart success started to diminish but he was still kicking out solid modern blues-rock. Often, the material that was cut from
Feel This and its all-covers 1995 sequel Cover to Cover was slightly looser and wilder than what made the finished album, finding
Healey indulging his love for swing jazz (the instrumental "Bish Bang Boof"), rocking a little harder ("Daze of the Night"), and choosing more interesting covers than the barroom standards that littered Cover to Cover (
Bob Seger's "We've Got Tonight,"
Springsteen's "Adam Raised a Cain"; take note that "You Go Your Way, I'll Go Mine" is not a
Dylan cover). Some of this still drifts into somewhat generic major-label blues-rock, where the neon gloss of the production undermines
Healey's chops, but nothing here is embarrassing, it's all of piece with his Arista records, and it's a worthwhile odds and sods for the dedicated. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine