(2014) Elijah Ocean - Bring It All In
Review: Elijah Ocean’s new album is a delight from start to finish. There are glorious harmonies, melodies to die for and the whole thing is a breath of fresh air in an over-angst-ridden market. Opening track “Ride It Out”, indeed much of the album, has the feel of early Ryan Adams solo outings, only a little more acoustic. It’s also a life-affirming positive song, and there aren’t that many of them about. There’s a proper country sweetness to the music and every track has a gorgeous hook or chorus and there are great harmonies as well from Ocean and Sarah Durning. One might invoke the spirit of Gram and Emmylou and not be guilty of hype.
Ocean has been around for a while, playing in bands, on other people’s records and so forth as well as producing two previous solo albums, but this is clearly the one where he hits his stride. There’s nary a weak spot to be heard. “Savannah Rose” is drenched in steel and harmonica, the title track has echoes of CSN, “Last Stand” is proper country rock, “Sapphire Blue” shivers the soul and Ocean’s lonesome aching vocals are powerful and moving throughout. There may be only eight songs and a total running time of barely thirty-six minutes but this is a perfectly distilled set that, once heard, has to be heard again. And again. And Rating 8/10
Tracklist: 01 Ride It Out
02 Savannah Rose
03 Bring It All In
04 Last Stand
05 Alarms
06 Sapphire Blue
07 Dashboard
08 Rosa
Summary: Country: USA
Genre: alt-country, folk-rock, singer-songwriter
Media Report: Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~727-914 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
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