Young blond surfer-ish dude strums his acoustic down by the
\noceanside. The girls sway around the firepit as the waves crash, a
\nbottle of wine is passed and the spirit of every beachfront,
\nhippiefied artiste from Jack Kerouac to Jack Johnson is
\ninvoked.<\/p>\n
Based on the cover art to
\nThe Bottle Of Wine EP<\/i>, it would be easy to dismiss Thomas
\nCunningham as a caricature. Easy, and wrong.<\/p>\n
Yes, Cunningham’s instrument of choice is the acoustic guitar,
\nand his vocals in places assume a laconic fireside manner. But the
\ninstrumentation here ranges from Cunningham’s own intricate playing
\n(“The Bottle Of Wine”) to tasteful slide (“Sunset On The
\nBoulevard”) to some fairly tasty electric work (“Senseless”).
\nCunningham goes with full-band arrangements on half these songs and
\na rhythm section on all of them, giving him a fuller, slightly
\nheavier sound than you might anticipate.<\/p>\n
The main thing to be learned from this disc, though, is that
\nthis kid (he’s 19) can write. His songs have almost a rap feel in
\nplaces as TC catches the flow and breezes through a dense lyric
\nlike the title track, rhyming up a storm and constantly pushing the
\nmusic ahead. (You can feel the Ben Harper influence there – oh
\nyeah, definitely.)<\/p>\n
To his credit, Cunningham also hits some strong emotional notes
\nwith lyrics, especially on the rather Shawn Mullins-y “Senseless,”
\nwhose emotionally co-dependent narrator struggles to rescue a lover
\nwho doesn’t want to be rescued. “She’s such a mess \/ Thought ‘all
\nshe needs is a little bit of me,” sings Cunningham, and it rings as
\ntrue as his coda, in which the object of his affection goes from
\nscreaming “I can’t go on!” to “You can’t move on!” at him.<\/p>\n
“Chemical Monday” is another nice acoustic-and-rhythm piece
\nabout addictions and illusions, with nice little lyrical nuggets
\nlike “False hopes never die” and “What a day to die \/ The day I
\nfeel most alive,” and some nice organ accents toward the end. The
\ncloser to this six-track EP, “Sayonara,” is a quirky kiss-off to a
\nlong-time relationship whose free-association chorus goes “The days
\nhave changed \/ Now everything, there’s no flame”\u2026 and
\nactually makes sense, in the context of the verses.<\/p>\n
I’ll confess I also have to root for Cunningham because he’s a
\nlocal No Cal boy, calling Davis his hometown and publishing this
\ndisc on Santa Cruz-based Emerald City. I will definitely be
\ncatching a show sometime, preferably without a surfboard in sight.
\nFor now, you can catch this EP at
\nwww.thomas-cunningham.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":26802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[7062],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-38075","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-thomas-cunningham","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=38075"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=38075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}