Right from the off, slide guitar joins forces with honky-tonk good-time piano as, from Edinburgh via RADA, Equity card carrying troubador FREDDIE STEVENSON shifts style to give 'Don't Fall In Love' some effortless Stateside country charm.
The one-time stage and small-screen actor has clearly absorbed plenty in the way of U.S. customs and culture in the three years since the pursuit of musical greatness saw him suddenly cast as the archetypal 'Englishman in New York'. However, such is the relative nature of things, it's this displacement of his trademark, quintessentialy British charm that's sure to endear him to American audiences.
Precisely subtitled 'A Romantic's Guide To Survival In NYC' this third Freddie Stevenson album is a much more reflective record - this mirrors the solitary nature of his journey across the Atlantic. Starry-eyed and lovesick-clumsy calendar-allegory 'Ten Times A Day' apart, there's little of the brightly-delivered oddball humour prevalent in both 'Body On The Line' and last year's 'All My Strange Companions'; in its place a much grimmer outlook offers only the bleakest of sardonic cackles.
Stevenson does indeed hail the metropolis in the rolling, pie-eyed title track as the strings heighten the piano-fuelled drama of an endless search for 'the one'. Though it all seems so futile, he succeeds brilliantly in conveying the completely random nature of what we prefer to call 'fate', as well as the notion that true loneliness is only experienced whilst you're alone in the midst of thousands of passing strangers.
Burning souls contemplate disorientated lust and eternal damnation during the strange-but-familiar sense of alienation present in 'Dying To Turn You On'.
Wistful, whisky-fuelled, well crafted and beautiful, the likes of 'Learning Your Name' and 'Happy Hour' are vehicles for the contemplation of ethereal rescue that exist inside the moment, whilst the subliminally phrased arpeggios of 'A Woman In Winter' reaches in vain for the impossible clarity of Hammond-thawed peripheral thoughts/hopes/dreams. Unrequited, unattainable and unobtainable, it's about being guided by imaginary ideals even if you know that they'll always be beyond your grasp
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Angst levels hit fever pitch as the sax is forced to crank it up and our hero throws his hands to the skies in a direct appeal to Almighty God. Tapping in beautifully to the common knowledge that prayer is the last resort for lost souls, it's the most restless and despairing song on the record by far.
Stevenson adopts a classic rock stance to defy the folk essentialness of the fiddle and his trusty acoustic guitar for the tenth and final track 'The Horse's Grave'. As the memories unfold with the added weight of expectation, like teardrops they also sparkle with glittering and gorgeous harmonics.
There's less instant pop appeal but arguably more quality in this mind-broadened and undoubtedly more mature collection. Stevenson never strays from shared consciousness, and yet his trust in familiar structures and themes has resulted in a record that's much, much deeper than the sum of its parts.
Freddie Stevenson official website
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