Matt Maw | rawr reviews
I don’t listen to folk music, but Reed Turner’s Side One: See How Far I Get makes me want to travel country back-roads with nothing but a guitar, an unkempt beard and a knapsack full of dreams.
Turner’s September 2011 EP is six tracks of good advice, fair warnings, calls for freedom and fond remembrances. Here are the words of wise friends and loving relatives. Its folk-rock rhythms and powerful, inviting vocals flow like a mountain river through soft, harmonica-laced reflections, frolicking tambourine dance numbers and thoughtful falsetto choruses. Turner takes us on life’s journey, with all its playful energy, sober examination and invaluable memories.
The album opens and closes with pensive finger-picking in the cautionary number “Beware the Hand” and the heartwarming reverie “Acrobats and Soldiers.” The technique frames the journey in between, which holds a variety of other satisfying tracks. There’s the go-for-broke, guitar-and-drums-driven anthem for the seekers in all of us See How Far I Get. The toe-tapping “Let’s Roll” inspires us to stop worrying, grab a loved one and dance a hoedown with the moon. The other two tracks softly address our penchants for apathy and misunderstanding with pleasant grooves that belie the gravity of the subjects.
Turner’s Side One: See How Far I Get carries us through shadowed valleys of melancholy and rumination and across sun-kissed mountaintops of determined joy. And at the end of the trek, like an affectionate grandfather, it drapes us with a warm blanket as the sunsets behind the hills.
Sweet dreams.
Reed Turner will be performing Thurs. April 5 in the Student Union International Ballroom at 8:00 p.m.