I must preface this revue with a little honesty on my bias: I am fanatic about Thrice and their assorted projects. If they've recorded it, I am probably not going to have enough good things to say about it since I've been listening to them since my early high school days and every record released fails drastically to disappoint. With this bulldog tenacity in mind, allow me to continue.
Dustin Kensrue's sophomore follow up to his first solo record Please Come Home continues in the vain of his first project. Most of the songs are completely bare of instrumentation aside from his vocals and his guitar. With many solo projects I fall in love with the artist expands their genre base and experiment with something different from their usual fare (the most notable variance from this is Jasta, but that's basically Hatebreed with a different name and has a completely different purpose behind it). This is true of Springsteen's Nebraska and Dallas Greene's City and Colour project. Kensrue has taken this route as well, focusing on an acoustic styling that rarely strays far from folk and blues roots that lend no small amount of honesty to the record. In a rush to get the record done, Kensrue has elected to make this release exclusively a digital download, so fire up your iTunes boys and girls and get to purchasing because this one's nothing short of awesome.
On his previous release, Kensrue included several Christmas songs, and he has cited Christmas music as a favorite genre of his. Therefore it's not terribly surprising that this whole collection is Christmas music. The tunes are often simple and some have a story to tell. Fairytale of New York tells the story of two men spending Christmas in the drunk tank. The great part of the song is truly that they are one in the same person, one having all the fights with his lover and drunken lonely nights and the other at the end o his life that "won't see another [Christmas]".
The rest is a collection of favorite carols. All are done with a serious blues influence that enforces the minor melodies of O Come O Come Emanuel and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. His guitar rings bright and clear on the rest of the tracks, and there is not a throw away song on the album.
All in all, if I had a star system I'd slap five on this one, but the breakdown I have is simple: borrow (if it's worth hearing once and never again), burn (if it's worth owning, but not spending a lot of money on), and steal (which is you have to own this one), this is a solid steal now!
That's it from the crows nest for now.
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