TREVOR ALGUIRE – TILL SORROW BEGINS TO CALL

2012 – Self Released
3.5***
Trevor Alguire is an excellent vocalist whose warm expressive voice probably has the right sort of qualities to have joined the big selling Nashville ‘hat acts.’ The fact that he hasn’t, instead choosing to plough his own rootsy country furrow, should suit anyone that has a liking for slightly left of centre country music. He is certainly not way out on the left wing but is far enough from the centre to have his own individuality. His songs and those excellent vocals have a depth of feeling and variety that much of the commercial side of country music struggles to match. His well written tales are predominately about reflections on troubled or broken relationships and separation from those you love. Were it not for the slightly off centre slant to these stories and an element of realism some could sound a little twee. The fact that they don’t is thanks equally to the sympathetic production and his excellent down to earth delivery.
Stating the obvious, this struck me as being an album of two halves, with the second half having much more variety and intensity and consequently more power than the first. In a nutshell, the first half dozen songs are all very good if several were at times in danger of sounding a little bland and a little too close to‘commercial country music.’ The second however, generally has a slightly more edgy feel despite the fact that the themes are not hugely different, but the instrumentation seems a little more varied and the songs, strangely, have more impact, certainly on me anyway!
Album opener I’m Going Crazy (Out Of Your Mind) includes a lovely melodic jangling guitar
sound on an excellent country tale of lost love, divorce and heartbreak. This one song sums up Trevor Alguire’s songwriting abilities covering such emotive subject matter so succinctly in the space of just a few verses. Nothing More To Give is a little edgier than the preceeding songs with it’s nice acoustic guitar and banjo sound with lovely haunting steel on another highly descriptive sad broken relationship tale. Since When’s Dying A Sin, despite it’s title includes elements of humour on a song that has a strong bluegrass feel with the banjo, mandolin and tremendous harmonies giving an added lift. The Yearsis probably the most powerfully intense song on the album and with it’s excellent production tells about the passing of time and is followed by With Trust Comes A Burden, with it’s haunting echoing twangy guitar and steel that gives the song an almost otherworldly feel at times and is perfectly summed up by the song title.
It’s probably not an album I will return to with huge frequency but that says more about my musical taste than it does about this album. Everything about the album is good and Trevor Alguire certainly has a lot of talent but I’d prefer it if he moved a bit closer to the left wing and took on the edginess that some of the songs on this disc already have.
http://www.trevoralguire.com/