Sweet Soul Needed
Sweeten The Distance
is an apt descriptor for the process of listening to this album, not that I
mean it’s an aural procedure – just that whatever time you spend absorbing
these 11 alt-country tracks will be honeyed by Casal’s gentle vocal and
pleasing compositions. It’s not a tart selection: time playing with the
Cardinals has clearly influenced these Adamsesque songs with their plaintive narratives
and sweet harmony choruses; the pedal steel providing background Americana roots.
The opening three songs – title track, Bird
With No Name, Need Shelter – are the
soft and smooth starter.
Fourth Let It All
Begin introduces a more up-tempo, trudging beat, but the next White Fence Round House slows the pace
again; however, this is a lovely ballad washed by harmony and Casal’s light,
sweet vocal. This is a stand-out song and my favourite. Sixth So
Many Enemies slowly punches again, but then seventh Feathers for Bakersfield returns to a strings launched and then Country
tinged ballad – the strings and pedal steel sweeping in and out in an unusual push’n’shove
for attention.
Eighth Time &
Trouble is darker lyrically and foregrounds Casal’s guitar playing a
little, but it isn’t until ninth How
Quiet It Got that there’s a mini excitement of sound in the middle and this
could and should have been sustained then raised by a wilder playing of the
guitar at its end. The final two songs play out in more sweetly soft harmony
and pedal steel, but there is a danger of anonymity in this plateauing. By the
end I think some listeners will find it sickly-sweet. This isn’t my judgement -
having the tooth for this kind of pleasantness - but there were times when I
would have liked Casal to inject some of that lively soul funk he put into the
recipe with his work in Hazy Malaze.
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