Dark River (studio album)
by Lydia Luce

From Mercury 04/20/2021 19:13 | #268804

(What a great voice. What solid songs. What an excellent old school pop singer/songwriter album with country tinges, lots of strings draped over the tracks and earnest heart. I really just feel this album is refreshing.)

There is something about this sound. Its clean, unpretentious, and it features lots of strings, lots of production details, a the way Lydia Luce's voice is recorded makes it clear that the producer understood the quality of it. The album has an un-hip willingness to simply cleanly and dramatically present this set of very good songs. Its...great. It's great.

The way the opener starts with that gorgeous chorus and those sappy/beautiful string sounds does a good job of introducing you to what this album is. Then throughout the album there are some interesting production choices - the chunky chug of the heavy bass and guitar of track 2 "Dark River", the way the sappy strings introduce us to track 3 "Tangled Love" before Lydia's voice comes in and steals our hearts and then the hand clap heavy percussion just leaning into the pop of the song. Oh and the the subtle pedal steel that spruces up "Something to Say" and how this touch just lends a whole new level of romantic sadness and longing, that woozy almost Lanois-esque sound on "Never Been Good" that serves the larger-than-life quality that reminds me of some old school Heartland Rock bangers but MUCH MORE SO the brilliant sounds on recent The War On Drugs albums, the tinkly piano and the weird almost dreamy strings of "Maybe In Time", the hard charging (relatively) almost old school Lucinda drama of the excellent "Leave Me Empty" etc etc. Those were 2 ridiculous run-on sentences. I guess what I'm saying there is a commitment to make these tracks sound great, pretty and almost all the production choices support the vocals and lyrics of Lydia herself. She has something, that special engaging quality that stars or should-be-stars have. She is stellar on this album. And the record bolsters that quality.

Anyway, this is a bit of a scatter shot note, but TL:DR this is an excellent pop/country/singer songwriter album featuring good songwriting and vibrant and unabashedly over the time pop clean production and some really impressive vocal performances. Check it out.