A busy week prevented me from
writing this review, but with a series of walks ahead of me today I got up
early so I could get my thoughts down before I left and then move on to…who
knows?
The odyssey is random, my friends.
Embrace the randomness.
Disc 1028 is…All These Dreams
Artist: Andrew
Combs
Year of Release: 2015
What’s up with the Cover? Andrew Combs head…and a tear in
the upper left corner. I ordered this on Amazon, which I rarely do (support
your local record store!) and it came damaged. I suppose I could’ve kicked up a
fuss with Amazon, but the older you get the more you realize that those hours
you spend getting satisfaction over minor slights are better spent doing
something enjoyable.
How I Came To Know It: I read a review of Combs’ 2017
album “Canyons of My Mind”. That got me interested, and led me to his back
catalogue, and “All These Dreams”.
How It Stacks Up: I’ve only got two Andrew Combs’ albums. His
follow up album, “Canyons of My Mind” has my favourite song by him but “All
These Dreams” has better songs and production overall, and so I put it at #1.
Ratings: 4 stars
I’m glad
that scheduling conspired to keep this album in my ears for a few extra days,
because it got better and better on each listen. If I’d rushed through I might
not have recognized it for the subtle beauty it was.
When I
got on the bus Tuesday morning, I wasn’t terribly in the mood for Andrew Combs.
I had narrowly missed rolling an album by the heavy metal band “Ancient Empires.”
I’ve been on a bit of a rediscovery of metal music for the last couple of weeks
and rolling Ancient Empires just seemed fitting, but it was not to be. I was to
journey once again into the land of indie folk.
What I
initially noticed was the odd extra percussion and excess steel guitar on the
first track, “Rainy Day Song.” I kept
thinking how Combs sounded like Blue Rodeo or Gordon Lightfoot, but not quite
as good. The hook on “Foolin’”
sounded far too similar to Tom Petty’s “Crawling
Back to You” making me wonder if anything new was going to happen.
About
halfway through the first listen, my ears settled in and accepted their
mission, and I started to appreciate Combs for some of the very reasons I had
earlier been unimpressed. He still reminded me heavily of Blue Rodeo and Gordon
Lightfoot, but this was a good thing. Other than “Foolin’” he didn’t sound derivative. He sounded like someone who
wasn’t afraid to bring country, folk and rock elements together and make them
work.
Combs is
a gifted songwriter, creating melodies that have a mid-career sophistication to
them without falling into the trap of being fancy for the sake of being fancy.
I would probably have made the production a little less lush, but Combs leaves
sufficient room for the melody to breathe its magic that it is just a minor
quibble on my part. He is aided ably by excellent playing of studio musicians Jeremy
Fetzer (guitar) and Spencer Cullum Jr. (pedal steel). The mix is nice and even,
giving every instrument a chance to shine, and Combs’ voice is powerful enough
to rise above it all when the song demands it.
Combs’
voice reminded me of Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy. He doesn’t have Cuddy’s chops, or
the same depth of broken-hearted hurt that Cuddy has, but he comes awfully close.
He certainly has enough of both to make these intensely personal songs resonate
with authenticity.
The song
that first drew me in was “Pearl.”
Driven by the heavy thud of the bass guitar, and punctuated by cascade of minor
keys, “Pearl” is a song that asks you
to look a bit more carefully at the down-and-out. Everyone has a story: a
homeless man who was once a gifted musician, a prostitute raising her two
younger brothers, and a criminal who took the rap so his brother could run. “Pearl” helps you get past the surface and
see that marginal people also have a story worth telling.
With “Pearl” giving me purchase on Combs’
sound and purpose, the album began falling into place. “Long Gone Lately” is a country song the way country music sounds
when it is at its best; plaintive and heartfelt. The song is punctuated by
steel guitar and some kind of trail whistling, and it all works. There’s even a
little castanet action, which I now welcomed.
A run of
solid songs cascaded by, full of flawed triumphs, things broken and then reconstructed
into song. Combs dredges up some dark thoughts and works them out with you as
witness. “Slow Road to Jesus” is a
song about someone resigned to drink himself into an early grave. It is
followed by “Month of Bad Habits”
where he decides a month of self-destructive behavior is sufficient. OK,
technically he says it’ll be “more than a
month of bad habits” but you get the impression he’ll call it quits before
he meets Jesus.
The
album ends with “Suwannee County”. It
is a stripped down pastoral, and features the best vocals Combs offers on the
album. “Suwannee County” is a quiet, gentle
invitation to start again, once your soul is healed up and ready.
Armed
with that fresh start, I began the album again, and then a third time, and then
a fourth. On each successive listen I liked it more. “Rainy Day Song” became a beautiful, slow building track – a song
that signaled the coming storm of the heart that Combs would explore through
the rest of the record. “Foolin’”
still felt a little derivative, but only a little. It now felt like the outlier
on the record, not its representative.
“All
These Dreams” is a headphones album. Like a lot of beautiful things, it steals
into your soul when you are being quiet and attentive, and giving it a chance
to work its magic. I encourage you to do so.
Best tracks: Rainy Day Song, Strange Bird,
Pearl, Long Gone Lately, In the Name of You, All These Dreams, Suwannee County
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