Run On Sentence – You, the Darkness & Me
Alright, this time for real. I reviewed this album, or at least a very close approximation of it, a few months back when Dustin Hamman first got in touch with me to invite me to have a listen.
Generally I don’t review albums until they are actually available for purchase, because things don’t spend that long at the top of a blog page and I think that maximises the opportunity for impulse purchases.
So after a lot of work You, the Darkness & Me finds a home on Hush Records, one of if not the best record labels to be found in Portland’s everso fertile music scene. Good, is all I can say, because this is a fucking lovely album.
Going back to my original review, there is a lot of Gothic folk-noir about this but more along the lines of Elvis Perkins than Timber Timbre. That I am comparing Run On Sentence to two of my favourite bands of the last few years is entirely appropriate, because I think this stuff is right up there with recent work by both of those bands.
It positively drips with emotion. There’s something in the performance which pretty much promises that he really, really means it. In the initial review I said that the flamboyance of this album and the borderline melodrama of some of the emotional crescendoes went a little over the top for my taste, but over time I think that has changed. Yes, it is an emotionally expressive album, but not excessively so; it just took me a little while to get used to it.
My friend Ritchie from Loch Lomond, another Portland band, tells me that Dustin Hamman is one of the few people he knows who can truly pull off a solo acoustic show with genuinely compelling charisma, and without sounding like ‘just another singer-songwriter’, and listening to this I can really believe it.
So, now that you can actually do so, please go an buy this record. You won’t be disappointed.
Run on Sentence – I am the Blood
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Run on Sentence – Out in the Woods
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