Singer-songwriters are a dime a dozen; for every Elliott Smith, Rufus Wainwright and Jeff Buckley, there are a thousand more well-intentioned buskers paddling to stay afloat in a sea of oblivion. Despite the odds stacked against him, Los Angeles\u2019 own Ferraby Lionheart still manages to emerge a diamond in the rough on his debut full-length, Catch the Brass Ring.\u00a0<\/i>\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The album begins with \u201cUno Ballo Della Luna,\u201d a brief wisp of a track that seems to emerge from a crackling transistor radio, floating along on subdued acoustic guitar strums and warm, warbling vocals. The worn-in, vintage feeling continues on \u201cSmall Planet;\u201d \u201cI was born a world ago, on top of rocks and under snow,\u201d Lionheart aptly croons, backed by swaying piano and punctuating dashes of strings and brass on this folk-pop gem, a barely three-minute stunner fellow troubadour Elliott Smith would have been only too happy to have laid claim to. <\/p>\n
Brass Ring <\/i>thrives on an atmosphere that is at once sleepy and energized, optimistic and fragile, brimming with shy hope and offest by a shoegazing melancholy. \u201cVermont Avenue,\u201d for one, is understatedly beautiful featuring Lionheart\u2019s lovelorn double-tracked vocals combined with graceful, sweeping strings and plucked guitar lines. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, both \u201cThe Car Maker\u201d and \u201cBefore We\u2019re Dead\u201d are invigoratingly upbeat; the former jangles with sunny horns and wide-eyed innocence as a chorus of voices proclaims, \u201cIt’s not that I don’t see \/ It’s that I don’t want to see \/ It’s not that I don’t know \/ It’s that I don’t want to know,\u201d while \u201cBefore We\u2019re Dead\u201d launches straight into a toe-tapping New Orleans jazz intro with rollicking guitars and pulsing of bass soon added to the fray. <\/p>\n
Lyrically, the album is as lush as its instrumentation: \u201cYoungest Frankenstein\u201d spins the classic tale of dissecting and reassembling on its head with lines like \u201cYou showed me fires burn \/ Taught me tables turn; now I\u2019m turning on the heat\u201d and \u201cYou taught me how to run; now I\u2019m running away from you,\u201d and the golden, slow-dripping \u201cUnder The Texas Sky\u201d most memorably features the unabashedly sugary metaphor \u201cI miss you like a honey jar misses the bear.\u201d Aww. <\/p>\n
From start to finish, Catch the Brass Ring <\/i>is wonderful and warm-hearted, overflowing with delicate harmonies and bittersweet sentiment — it\u2019s a grower of an album that endears as it unfolds, and Ferraby Lionheart is definitely one to watch. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":28987,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[8041],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-40495","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-ferraby-lionheart","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40495","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\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40495"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40495"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}