Daniel Romano - Sleep Beneath The Willow (2011)

Tracklist

01. Time Forgot (To Change My Heart)
02. Hard On You
03. Lost (For As Long As I Live)
04. Knowing That You're Mine
05. Louise
06. Helen's Restaurant
07. Paul and Jon
08. I Won't Let It
09. Never A Forced Smile
10. There Are Lines In My Face
11. Nothing


Sometimes the opening track tells you everything you need to know about an album and so it is here. “Time Forgot (To Change My Heart)” is a slow, stately classic country song – hell, it even has brackets in the title – that showcases Romano’s deep vocal, has a chorus of slightly spectral female harmonies, and tells a tale of darkness whose horror is amplified by Romano’s matter of fact delivery. Having said that, there are also moments when Romano could be channelling Gram Parsons, as on “Hard On You”, which sounds like an outtake from “Grievous Angel”.
Whatever he does though, Romano always sounds like a great lost country singer, full of genuine emotion and aching and, with the old style steel and fiddle that accompany him there’s none of that knowing post-modernism, it’s totally straight and totally sincere with nary a knowing wink, and all the better for it.

The live “Nothing“ that closes the album is perhaps the best thing here, a tall statement given the quality of what’s gone before, but the stripped down, one man and his guitar deprived of everything that matters in his life is a casual chiller.

Light and shade is provided by the clever wordplay on “Helen’s Restaurant” though it’s misery that Romano does best, and “Louise”, a quietly desperate elegy for a lost wife is a small masterpiece. Playing most of the instruments, recording, producing and above all writing all the songs, Daniel Romano is a significant talent and his next album can’t come too soon.

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