IAN McFERON - Acoustic

This deceptively simple 10 track album, from Seattle songwriter Ian McFeron, is a real grower and after having lived with it for a good few days now I find many of the sings lodged in my brain. They are all soaked in Country and Americana and never overstay their welcome. With a simple array of guitar, fiddle, piano, a touch of cello here and there, some light percussion and tambourine we have a superb low-key record. The songs themselves are light and melancholic and remind me of a number of different artists like the Willard Grant Conspiracy and, at times, Randy Newman with the predominant confessional style songs that invoke lost loves, childhood and times gone.

The album opens with the upbeat 'Down the Road' as we are taken through big questions about life with some advice about "finding what we are looking for a little way down the road'. In other hands this might sound a little clichéd but the vocal is strong and committed and Alisa Milner's melancholic fiddle and subtle backing vocals lift it into a different dimension.

Milner's fiddle is the dominant instrument in the second song 'That's Where I Learned to Sing' that's comes across like a sad remembrance of a childhood passed. McFeron's lovely vocal reminds us what we all feel about the past sometimes. The tempo goes up a gear for 'Feelin' Good' which seems to be about the joys of living without artificial stimulants and getting high on nature and life instead of sex drugs n rock n roll and hits us with the refrain of "well I used to feel bad but now I feel so good".

'The Sands Hotel' sounds like a place of strange and weird mystery and I'm not sure it's somewhere I'd like to visit. It begins with a stately piano introduction leading us into a cold and lonely town covered in dust and memory. We get advice to "pick up your bag and hit the street running" with the waves lapping on the beach leaving only lonely footprints in the sand - yikes!

'Streetlight Serenade' has the most beautiful fiddle refrain and Ian's insistence that  'I would do anything...' sticks in your memory long after the album is over. In fact all the arrangements are classy but straight forward and help to evoke life's inherent simplicity as on 'The First Cold Day of Fall' and 'Summer is Gone' towards the end of the album. Both songs take us through the end of summer and the coming of Halloween and the winter, with a beautiful evocation of this time highlighted by a sad fiddle line running through them.

This is not one of those records that screams "instant classic" at you but the songs are wonderfully crafted and 'Acoustic' is a superb and memorable album that repays repeated listens and is available from Ian's website now, do yourself a favour, click here and buy....

http://www.ianmcferon.com/Acoustic_Album

Words: Greg Johnson