A monotonous album that deals nicely with the issues of 2020
With the terrible year that is 2020 coming to a close, Tekla Waterfield and Jeff Fielder decided that they wanted to write something to be released at the beginning of 2021 that was a response to the heavy and anxiety-filled events of the past year. What they have created is a soothing and gentle record, one that blends their talents together wonderfully, and creates an album of hope for a better year.
The opening song, ‘Let There Be’, was written to 2020’s graduating seniors as a message of hope. Its slow grooves work perfectly with Tekla’s voice and is one of the standout songs of the album with the power of its message. But one of the issues of the record is that it is quite monotonous, and the songs seem to blur into each other with little difference between them, with the title track, ‘Trouble In Time’ also having a nice groove, but feeling very similar.
Where the record succeeds is where there are moments of difference, namely in ‘Burden of Fear’ which not only has the similar dreamy vocals and almost ethereal sound, but also a brilliant electric guitar that gives it a sound similar to Morcheeba. ‘Wrong Time State Of Mind’ is another one of the songs that has a chance for some success, with a beautiful female harmony running throughout it, a style that has become extremely popular in recent times.
Perhaps the only other song that stands out is ‘Through The Falls’, which mainly has a lot of spoken word running through it. It disappoints largely, and doesn’t have the desired effect however.
Overall, the album deals well with the perhaps over-talked about topics of the last year in a calming and soothing manner yet still contains some hard-hitting messages, such as in ‘No Justice No Peace’, a protest song about equality: ‘human human, when will you see, until we are equal, we’ll never be free’. Ultimately however, the lack of diversity in the tracks means that the LP doesn’t break new ground.
Rather harsh rating assessment of this, albeit the ‘case against’ is made clearly. Am glad I picked up on their sound slightly earlier via this review https://www.nodepression.com/album-reviews/tekla-waterfield-and-jeff-fielder-paint-with-heartache-and-hope-in-trouble-in-time/ which flagged up the work more positively.