Gold Star - Big Blue (2017) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. Come With Me
02. Sonny's Blues
03. Blue Moon
04. It Ain't Easy
05. Blue Sky to Blue Sky
06. San Francisco Good Times
07. St. Vincent De Paul's
08. When You're Here
09. Analisa Knows
10. Deptford High St.
11. If Ever You're Lonesome
12. Be Here Now
13. The Strangler

LA, based Singer/songwriter Gold Star aka Marlon Rabenreither will release his next album Big Blue on Autumn Tone Records. Named after HIS home, where he recorded and currently resides in.

Playing out like an Orson Welles or Fritz Lang film, Big Blue captures Rabenreither as the star of his own high-concept noir. Rabenreither’s perspective, like Fritz Lang’s, is undoubtedly informed by his birth in Vienna, Austria and subsequent adoption of Los Angeles–an outsider’s take on the place that has become home.

Gold Star’s work trades in the type of desolate blues on which Townes Van Zandt toured through dive bars and cheap motels. His music also teems with soul–the type of soul with which Percy Sledge and Solomon Burke imbued country music; or in more recent years has been captured by Lucinda Williams, who asked Gold Star to open for her one fateful night after hearing him play backstage. Rabenreither takes these influences and adds his own acute detail to make each song his own. Frequently referencing place, characters, and personal experiences in the underbelly of the city, Gold Star’s music is vivid and emotional in a way that even great poets struggle to capture.

Marlon Rabenreither grew up in L.A. with a native son’s sense of what’s real and true and a childhood fascination with the Beatles, teaching himself to write and play a special kind of stark guitar-noir Americana that soon got him opening for Ryan Bingham and an admiring Lucinda Williams. On his new Autumn Tone release Big Blue-named after the ramshackle Hollywood home where he produced and recorded the album, and redefines the sound of his self-titled 2013 EP and his 2015 full-length Dark Days to reveal an autobiographical work as influenced by writers like Fante, Baldwin and Chandler as it is Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Wilco or Elliott Smith.

„In ‘Blue Sky to Blue Sky’ Rabenreither shares vocals with an unnamed female harmonist, and the comparisons with Gillian Welsh and David Rawlings, or Emmylou Harris with John Prine/Gram Parsons/Ryan Adams might be made; sweetness imbuing the vocal, giving it a plaintive mood. A tale of loneliness and escape, the song is stripped of instrumental layers, as ‘broken down’ as our protagonist. On ‘Analisa Knows’ an added keyboard dirge to the omnipresent pedal steel adds gravitas to another pretty folk song. If the mood is occasionally uniform, Gold Star’s Big Blue is a sombre treat.“ (Rob Taylor, Soundblab)

DOWNLOAD ALBUM [flac]

DOWNLOAD ALBUM [Hi-Res]