| CD REVIEW Aaron English |
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Band : Aaron English Very little exact info on this Seattle based piano/ keyboard player (due to the fact that his own website aaronenglish.com is currently being overhauled, and his MySpace is being scarce with info as well), but in the 5 years that he's been around he's not only delivered two full-length albums (The Waters Of This World and The Marriage Of The Sun And The Moon) which he released on his own, but also been on three national tours with The Aaron English Band...or rather, make that 2 ½ tours, because while the band was in the Midwest during the third tour two years ago, the tour bus was involved in a crash that destroyed also most of his instruments. Ergo, the rest of the tour was cancelled, and a very downed Aaron wrote a set of songs from a space where he needed to decide whether he was going to keep believing in the music and keep following the dream, or go for a more sedate style of life. But in Summer 2009 English's fans rallied together to raise part of the funds needed for the recording of the album under productional guidance of Sun Kill Moon's Geoff Stanfield in an 150 year-old warehouse in Seattle. Enough to make any musician believe what he's doing is really worth all the hardship. Heheh...believe...”Believe” happens to be the first track off the new album which was posted on Aaron's MySpace page in mid-November of last year...even before the mastering of the album was done during December. The song made it to the FMQB Modern A/C charts, peaking at #18, and remaining in the Top 40 for 16 weeks. Quite a feet for an unsigned act, I'd say! Meanwhile other goor things happened for Aaron, like his track “Animals Like Us” was used in the off-road BMX biking series Thrillbilllies of sports cable network FuelTV, with cuts from other songs off the American [Fever] Dream used in the network's shows throughout the Summer of 2010. So...what does it all sound like? Well, it's easy-listening music...at a first hearing, for sure...but don't be fooled, there's some nice intricacies all over the album, and quite a variety in styles as well! As mentioned in the info sheet we got along with our download promo copy (of which the track-list was quite jumbled, compared to the one I found posted at the album's page on Amazon.com...it also contained a surprise extra Ambient instrumental, of which I found no title) the album includes influences as diverse as 1960's Folk, Talking Heads-style White Funk, Ambient electronica (check “Sleight Of Heart” and its “attached” instrumental “Outro”), and gospel (listen to “Doves”), as well as Reggae (“God Bless You And Your Man”) and “ballad” (“Peace”). Both “Believe” and “Doves” are posted at myspace.com/aaronenglish, as well as some live recordings and 5 songs off Aaron's previous albums. In a couple of songs, I was reminded of Tom Robinson in the way Aaron occasionally deflects his voice...and the piano play evidently completed the picture, of course! There's a couple of songs (“God Bless You And Your Man”, “Peace”) with horns, on another couple of songs (“Anthem”, the ending of “God Bless You...”, “Sleight Of Heart”, and “The Name Of The Song Is Secret” - the latter apparently also with contribution of another male lead singer) I have the impression of hearing short vocal contributions of a female backing singer. Not that the male backings on most of the other songs aren't equally important...quite on the contrary, because in some cases the backing vocals make for an additional layered component in the music for the attentive listener to unravel. More good news for Aaron: he's recently released his very first music video, directed by the award-winning Trevor Sands, for the song “Anthem”, and in September he started work on two new EP's (slated for release in 2011) at Death Cab For Cutie's Two Sticks studio in Seattle. 88/100 Tony. |