Robert Vincent – In This Town You’re Owned
Thirty Tigers – 14 February 2020
The eagerly awaited follow-up to Robert Vincent’s 2018’s sophomore release, I’ll Make The Most Of My Sins, which earned him the UK Americana Music Association’s UK Album of The Year, finds the Liverpool-based singer-songwriter in musically expansive mood with three tracks passing the five-minute mark and one clocking in at just over nine.
Produced by Ethan Johns, In This Town You’re Owned is a response to the mood of the times when it was written, the songs informed, socially and politically, by both life in Liverpool and the state of the world. Indeed, waltzing album opener This Town, featuring Anna Corcoran on piano, Robbie Taylor’s fiddle and the ‘town choir’, addresses both the particular and universal in its call for community solidarity. With the music swelling, he sings “In this town you’ve got to see their light/In this town you’ve got help them fight/In this town you’ve got to own their pain”, but also cautions that, in such homogeneous situations, “You better know your friend and know your foe/You better test the water with your toe”, and hold on to who you are, warning that “If you let it own you you’ll pay the price”.
Jim Kimberley’s drums driving it along with a Buddy Hollyish shuffle, complete with handclaps, hoo hooing and twanging guitar solo, the rockingly upbeat My Neighbour’s Ghost also deals with notions of living in the moment and experiencing what and who’s around you (“truly feel the motion”) before it’s too late.
Again featuring the massed voices of the ‘town choir’, Kids Don’t Dig God Anymore addresses a recurring theme of faith and the lack of it, not in the sense of religion but of a spirituality dulled by cynicism, the six-minute track appropriately adopting a slow march church hymnal pace (albeit with some early psychedelic organ effects courtesy of Johns), asking how, when “The beasts are escaping the zoo” and there are no anchors, “we right such a wrong/How do we heal?”. Again, in rejecting the divisions created by politics and religion, “the answer is within all of us” and “The hope is we find our own peace/Together we wrangle the beast”.
Featuring Johns on the mandocello and accordion with Taylor on mandolin, The Ending brings a gently swaying Texicana touch to a song about love as the healer when life tears you apart, that it “has a way of mending” and “protects you in times of pain”.
Keeping the Americana flavour with mandolin joined by lap steel but overlaying a bluesy feel, Conundrum turns to the turmoils we all experience in “the daily struggle with your mind” and “your sudden movements out the blue”, its message succinctly summed up in the line “You’re born this world alone try to leave it better off when you go”.
Part of so doing means taking others into consideration and now insisting on always being “the only person in the room” as he puts it on the Dylan-shaded colours of If You Were You, a call to put aside ego and recognise the emptiness brought about by “stifling reflection of what it is you have become” and how “If only for a while, you took a back seat/Let somebody else hold the light/It shows no shame, to let your guard down/If only for a while you were you” because life is short and “There’s a door and a light/That you will lose, if you fight/Or you can welcome it”.
Edging eight minutes, opening with electronic bleeps and proceeding on a metronomic rhythm with moody organ and the first instance of Danny Williams’ electric bass, Husk Of A Soul is a bluesy reflection on the aftermath and detritus of a failed relationships, where you can either put things behind you or “shovel them up”, withdrawing and blaming others in “a toxic imbalance, years of abuse”. Again concerning rejection of faith, it’s not hard to hear the irony behind the lines “I’m stronger than you’ll ever be/Believing your words from an old-fashioned book/I’m stronger than you’ll ever be/Just me and myself”.
Accompanied by Corcoran’s piano and gradually taking on a shuffling brushed snares rhythm, things are a tad more hopeful with I Was Hurt Today But I’m Alright Now, a pleading for forgiveness and a second chance in “Please don’t leave me, When I’m not around”, vowing “I will take your broken window and fix it with the things I find around/I will take your unlit fire and find the fuel that helps it burn/I will read your unread messages that no-one had the time to read/I will dry your running eyes when no-one is around”.
A similar idea underpins the album’s closing track, Cuckoo (“a cuckoo will abandon its offspring/In the hope that they’re loved/Would you ever do that/Abandon my love”), another song about the narrator hurting those they love by lashing out in anger and of need for forgiveness, “Cos without forgiveness, we all feel the pain it creates”.
With Adrian Gautrey on ships organ the album epic is the simply picked, minimally arranged The End of the War, another glimmer of hope flickering in a muted protest song about the lies that can be used to send young lives off to war to do their duty against “the threat of a wickedness (that) will darken your door and make sonless mothers of many” to a place where “the faces you’ll see are like yours, but you’re expected to kill them”.
“I’m not against Mr Jones having faith in his Sunday school readings”, he sings, “but mankind has a bind and we need to see the future clearly” and that “till we strive for the stars and not just Mars and realise its meaning/Only then will there be peace in this world”.
Once more, solidarity and love in the face of adversity seem to guide the path (“come on boys it the time stand in line, the trenches we’re leaving”), the final words before the playout returning to the chorus refrain, “There’s a life at the end of the war/If you like I’ll still marry you then/There’s a light at the end of the war/I hope it’s you”.
Nobody knows the ending, he sings. But this outstanding album is a very good start on the path to finding the light at the end of the tunnel in which we seem to be lost.
Upcoming Tour Dates
21 Mar – Great Easton Village Hall, Great Easton
23 Mar – The Lexington, London
25 Mar – Greystones, Sheffield
26 Mar – Lending Rooms, Leeds
27 Mar – St Lawrence’s Church, Biddulph, Stoke-on-Trent
01 Apr – Louisiana, Bristol
02 Apr – Night & Day Cafe, Manchester
03 Apr – Jimmy’s Liverpool, Liverpool