Written
by William Elgin, posted by blog admin
Rock
n’ roll has been in dire need of a savior for quite some time. It’s hard to find interesting acts these
days, let alone people with a vision that goes beyond settling on and staying
in one style and one style only. Thomas
Abban could be the man up for the job of saving or at least resuscitating rock,
thanks to his dizzying, wild-eyed debut album, A Sheik’s Legacy. With an
orchestral sense of arrangement, many of the album’s 15 tunes pass through
“movements” or “passages” on their way to the finish line and many of the songs
end up in far different territory from whence they began. It’s a testament to Abban’s immaculate
writing and composing as well as the reason why this album works the whole way
through and its after effects are long-lasting.
The
record’s first four songs alone cover a lot of musical ground. Mournful and elegiac, “Death Song” conjures
up an acoustic trance of wayward, soulful instrumentation that takes a good 4
minutes and change to finally launch into a distorted, riff-tastic crescendo. “Symmetry & Black Tar” is full of
progressive twists and turns; lively acoustic guitar licks sweeping across
pile-driving tom-tom fills and thundercrack bass lines grooving steadily along
keep things in the red yet the song never goes into an outright frenzy. Abban saves the frenzy for bruising, beef-up
guitar figures on “Fear” and “Aladdin,” a pair of brawny blues-rock hammers
that drive home riff after riff of old school songwriting.
As
the record moves into its second phase, the songwriting opens up into arid,
open range acoustic textures with songs that trot and traipse but never lapse
in holding your attention. The gusty,
bluesy guitar shades, acoustic transitions, heavy drums and whistling vocal melodies
of “Time to Think” acts as a calmer interpretation of the hearty riffing of the
prior two cuts, settling the album down into the elaborate, finger-picked folk
of “Horizons” which smacks of some subtle Dylan influence. World weary blues is
the order of the day on “Sinner” where Abban’s voice wavers between smooth and
smoky to a shrieking howl. Neoclassical
strings and symphonic elements add some meat to the bones of the tune’s very
traditional framework. Delta acoustic
blues and Nashville country elements wash to the forefront of “Don’t You Stay
The Same” and “Let Me Tell You Something,” both tracks relishing largely
stripped-down, solo-songwriter ethics with “Irene” applying those same
standards to a wandering folk-pop ditty.
“Lord” dips into similar waters before the album goes back to the hard
and heavy stuff with the crushing guitar surgery of “Uh,” the fiery
atmospherics contained in “Echo,” “Black Water” and “Born of Fire” making for a
superb culmination of A Sheik’s Legacy and
its many awesome attributes.
Abban
never plays the same tune twice on his debut and the massive amount of
stylistic fluctuation between numbers makes for an impressive and engaging
listen. Each tune is very much an
individual piece that stands on its own two legs without the songs around it
being simply used to buttress any weakness.
A Sheik’s Legacy is all killer
and no filler!
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