I was going to begin this review championing this talented new Blues & Soul singer from Switzerland but come to find out this is album number 10 for Fankhauser! Pardon my ignorance. Turns out the sharp singer/songwriter started out in 1984 inspired and mentored by the late great Johnny "Clyde" Copeland. His first record dropped in 1989 and he later moved to New York (USA) in 1994 but returned to Switzerland following Copeland's death in 1997.

Included on "Watching From The Safe Side" are faithful covers of Clyde's "Blues Ain't Nothin" and "Love Song" produced by Dennis Walker (Robert Cray Band). Better in my estimation are Fankhauser's soulful originals like "Time Stands Still" and the title cut, which also features some sardonic lyrics, taking thinly veiled jabs at us Yanks. "I lost my last shirt in Vegas..I went as far as Mobile, Alabama, I saw the weirdest people I've ever seen...got my ass kicked in San Diego, the cops looked the other way...scary prison camps in New York State...and gulf playing fools in a luscious estate...now I'm watching from the safe side/I'm back in my home town".

In a more serious glance there's the Delta-fied story song "Thomas & Rodney", portraying "two men in a (American) bar"- one from Munich and one from Arkansas (who "just got back from the war"). "One from the land of the free and one from a free land" goes the refrain. Inclusion of the line "my government shipped me to Iraq" seems to reflect Europe's well-known mixed feelings about America.

Elsewhere Walker provides the excellent up from the bottom Blues "If You Ain't Been To Houston" featuring some tart axework by Fankhauser and tasty horns courtesy of Tom Peterson, Lee Thornburg and Ira Nepus and "Too Little Too Late", that I could definitely hear Robert Cray doing. To his credit Fankhauser delivers a convincingly aching vocal on an exquisitely arranged Soul song. Marco Jencarelli guests on the guitar solos. Impressive.

Dylann DeAnna, Blues Critic