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(2022) Will Stewart - Slow Life
Review:
Hailing from Birmingham, Alabama, Slow Life is Will Stewart’s third album, an easy rolling cocktail of Americana, folk rock and jangling guitar swagger, the influence of Dylan never too far away from his nasal drawl. A mid-tempo road song with organ backing and slide, album opener ‘Bad Memory’ is a road song that perversely proposes that recalling a bad memory is a way to achieve a more peaceful state of mind. Things remain in turmoil for the uptempo late ’60s-styled folk pop strum of ‘Nothing’s Right’, everything else seeming to go wrong (“Car won’t start / dog got sick/got two leaks on my roof/got a past due bill from the termite folks/a chip on my front tooth”) “when baby’s got the blues”. ‘New World Daydream’ turns up the folk-rock jangle with its echoes of The Byrds to warn against becoming stupefied by the numbing nature of these strange days of commodified contemporary life where “you walk around/as if you’re already dead” and “money, God and pills/won’t ever fix what’s in your head” and where, desperate to drink the wine, “you’ll do buddy what you’re told”. Let’s Go follows a similar musical path with a slightly harder edge to the rhythm and guitars conjuring thoughts of Tom Petty, leading into the acoustic strum and mixed back vocals of On The Edge of a Brightness with its tentative sense of breaking through the fog (“I keep on looking for a light/even though it’s getting dim and not so bright/and I still got a few things left to fight/I’m on the edge of a brightness tonight”). It’s back to jangle, twang and organ for the walking beat, lyrically simple self-recriminatory You’re Not Fun Anymore (“you got old and started keeping the score/of all those things/you used to hate/push and pull/ and complicate”) which is suitably offset by the chiming call to his lover to Just Be Sweet when he’s in a bad place (“you’re the only one around/this goddamn lonely town/who understands me now/so when I come back down/oh please/just be sweet”). The sense of feeling trapped continues with the slide-guitar-coloured, Pettyesque ballad Can’t Break Through (“I’m spinnin out/caught in a loop/damn this town/gotta get out soon/sick of myself for being stuck on blue”), one of several highpoints on the album. Preceded by the classic 1965 Dylan-styled sound of Tragedy (“begins at home or so I’m told”), it ends with him out on a New Highway, a dreamy, laid back slow scuffed shuffle in which, while salvation may still be a drive away and he’s still “hanging out to dry”, to echo I Shall Be Released, the light comes shining like “the cross down on corn house creek” to illuminate the path “and move my feet”. Suffused with a quiet melancholia and inviting you to stretch out and soak up the sounds, Slow Life may be in no hurry but it’s a fine reminder that it’s the tortoise who wins the race, not the hare.
Track List:
01 - Bad Memory
02 - Nothing's Right
03 - New World Daydream
04 - Let's Go
05 - On the Edge of a Brightness
06 - You're Not Fun Anymore
07 - Just Be Sweet
08 - Can't Break Through
09 - Tragedy
10 - New Highway
Media Report:
Genre: americana, folk-rock
Country: USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
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