Solo album number two from Truth and Salvage Co main-man.
The travails of the modern world get to most of us, but it seems to affect musicians in a particularly savage way, and this second album from Scott Kinnebrew in the guise of Sounding Arrow follows his debut back in 2017 (Love Is Breathing). It’s all about the lighter side of life, leaving behind all the hassle and stress. For this release, he’s aided by Gary Junes (Mad World) and is mixed by Bill Reynolds (Band Of Horses, The Avett Brothers), and the album has been praised by Seth Avett: “Skyman offers some peaceful perspective in a hectic world and invites us to coast in the clouds together for a bit!”
So Kinnebrew’s sound here fuses many styles close to his heart, including folk, country, blues, and British invasion R & B; what Kinnebrew thinks of as “sonic impressionism“. He’s got a knack for a great tune, and the musical breadth on offer is wide indeed. We open on some harmonica, guitar strumming, and steel pedal on Do You Mean It, a catchy and dreamlike tune; an impressive opening. Skyman opens on its instantly hummable tune and a cool West Coast vibe, and the chorus will have you singing along in no time.
The strongest track is the rocker Lucky Shaman, which opens on a lovely slice of chunky guitar playing, with a Grandaddy feel to it. Another strong tune with some lovely guitar playing, and it stays in the mind ages after you’ve first heard it.
Kinnebrew’s vocal stylings aren’t his strongest suit, but he makes the most of it on the likes of We Are The Kids, a slower but beguilingly catchy song with a dreamlike quality to it. Marvellous. It sounds like Jules has really managed to get Kinnebrew to push the boundaries of his sonic palette on tracks like Zero Gravity. This song goes back to 2015 when NASA announced that they were holding auditions for an expedition to Mars. The song features a regular guy who was selected to be a spaceman on a reality TV show. Kinnebrew had been listening to a lot of classical music around the time of its writing, and he admits there’s a classical feel to many of the chords in the song.
For My Baby is a short but sweet, edgier song, with some raucous electric guitar and lots of ‘ooh’ ‘aahs’ and hand claps add to the attraction of the song.
So there’s much to admire on this diverse, witty, well-produced album that showcases a very different side to Kinnebrew from his Truth and Salvage Co persona, and it’s a joy from start to finish.
