(2022) Riley Pearce - The Water & The Rough  


Review:
Indie singer/songwriter Riley Pearce delivers his debut full-length album, The Water & The Rough via Nettwerk. That’s a testament to how effortlessly he became a songwriter. Watching his dad in cover bands inspired him to pick up the guitar. By 17, he was busking at local farmer’s markets, playing covers but sneaking in a few original folky compositions about what he saw around him as well as the relationships he had formed. Not surprisingly, nature occupies a sizable piece of the artist’s musical DNA. For his debut album The Water & The Rough, Riley rented a house on the southwest coast of Australia. “I wanted to let the sounds of the house and the environment filter in,” explains Riley. If you listen closely, you can hear the sounds of floorboards, the house’s gravel driveway, mallets thumped on a couch, the metronomic tapping of a friend’s collar bone, the crackling of a fire, and more. Part empathetic meditation, Riley’s music possesses a depth of experience delivered through wafting melodies, thoughtfully blended found sounds and quietly introspective lyrics. The Water & The Rough was written before and during the pandemic, it possesses a depth of experience delivered through wafting melodies and quietly introspective lyrics, creating an album that seems at once peaceful and restless. Featuring previously released singles such “Furniture,” “Keep Moving,” “Nostalgia,” and “8 Hour Drive,” this debut album is just the beginning of what’s to come for Riley Pearce. The depth and warmth possessed in these anthemic acoustic melodies soar all over the record. On “The Water” Riley shares, “We wanted to lean into the song’s concept but bringing in a more cult like collective mindset to represent the struggles so many of us have in finding solace and the often sheep mentality that comes with carving out success in the music scene. The song is very much divided in two. After chatting with director Cedric Tang about the way we’d film the music video, we wanted to highlight the bass – stuttering to match it with zombielike movements from the actors…..The moment we hit that water though it was a real battle to control the teeth chatters, it was a great team to work with on this video and I’m super proud of how it turned out.” Cedric Tang, director of “The Water,” shares – “Riley came to me with the idea behind the track and I loved it. The track is split into two parts, and we really wanted to visually show this sense of trance-like social conformity in the first half by having everyone dressed in similar clothes and walking the same way to the beat. Once the song changes pace, that’s the moment where ‘the spell breaks’ and Riley has a kind of personal epiphany about his journey in music, and that’s when visuals get a bit more eclectic and alive. I decided to shoot the first half almost completely on the tripod, in the middle of the afternoon to give it that static, lifeless feeling; and the second half was pretty much shot handheld through the evening & night to give it a bit more energy and human-like movement. I loved the idea of using twilight, the transition time between day and night, to really push the moment the song transitions. Shooting day itself was everything all at once, we were hot & sweaty, then cold and shivering a few hours later, but it was a great time with everyone out in the bush. Working with Riley is always super collaborative and I love that.”


         


Track List:
01. Kindling
02. The Water (Explicit)
03. 8 Hour Drive
04. Walking Gold
05. Cloudships
06. Nostalgia
07. The Rough
08. Keep Moving
09. Furniture
10. Stone on Stone
11. Us
12. Call It


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk, indie-pop
Country: Perth, Australia
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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