(2023) Simon Rowe - Everybody's Thinking    


Review:
If the name Simon Rowe isn’t immediately familiar to you, the names Chapterhouse and Mojave 3 may be more so. He played guitar in both acts – the former one of the original shoegaze acts and the latter a more Americana-type proposition – and while you may hear echoes of the latter in this album, this third act for the artist is a rather different proposition. Gently starting with an instrumental called ‘Croxted Crows’, this album slowly unfolds as a sweetly pastoral, gentle, psychedelic delight. There are minor chords and delicate harmonies, phased effects and carefully arranged instrumentation all combining to create a hazy, heady, summery sound. Supported by fellow Mojave 3 troubadours Neil Halstead and Ian McCutcheon as well as all of Chapterhouse, another of Rowe’s previous bands, there is no radical departure from a previously established template. Particularly, the solo work of Halstead comes to mind wherein the material is not so important so much as the general mood created by the whole, so as we go deeper into the album it becomes more satisfying as songs build upon songs ‘Saturn Saw’, ‘Everybody’s Thinking’ and ‘Over and Over’ have splashes of discordant guitar or climaxes within the songs but these are counterpoints to the overall warmth and hypnoticism of the washing sounds. Not once does Rowe raise his voice or dare to emote, which does mean that the mood is fairly one-dimensional overall. A very mellow, lovely dimension but still without a great deal of light and shade. ‘Monkey Brain’ threatens to disrupt things with its stridency but also soon subsumes to the script as the harmonies hove into view. — americanaUK


   


Track List:
01 - Croxted Crows
02 - Saturn Saw Us
03 - Everybody’s Thinking
04 - Over & Over
05 - Let It Go By
06 - Talk Too
07 - Monkey Brain
08 - Trust In Someone
09 - Oh Lordy Me
10 - Before Sundown


Media Report:
Genre: dream-pop, indie-folk
Country: UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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