English musician Adam Irving is known to rely on the guitar as his main instrument of choice, but for his new album Baby Rhino he switched to the piano. It makes quite a difference and there are quite a few instrumentals besides his usual pop rock idiom - the melancholy of An Ice Day is summoned with an only a handful of notes, but each of them counts.
He is a traveller (Venice Again, A Garden In Topanga) and a story teller, always on the move with an open eye for his surroundings and the characters he runs into. He is his own backing vocalist and he can turn himself into a one-man XTC-alike band with songs Not The End and jazzy lounge lizard during I Danced Sideways that will go down well with fans of Rufus Wainwright.
Without an A&R-type breathing down his neck telling him what the people will like and expect, he can roam free in a musical universe, wherein the only rules he has to follow are his own. An eclectic album like Baby Rhino is like a full course meal, so it makes sense to top it off with a recipe for a classic English desert, Caramel Custard Recipe.
Baby Rhino is a self-released album. Buy it from his website.
Tracks:- In The Middle
- Not The End
- I Danced Sideways
- Venice Again
- Sequoia
- Magpie
- An Ice Day
- Another November
- Fragment
- Sleepy Desert
- Sentimental Bullshit
- Hand Held Tighter
- A Garden In Topanga
- The Will To Go On
- I Still Want That
- My Guitar
- Mellowed
- Pulse
- Caramel Custard Recipe
HCTF review of Tomorrow & Tomorrow.
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