
B. Hamilton – Back in the Line
Show don’t tell! That’s the advice given to every aspiring writer. Yet, most of the songwriters crafting songs nowadays spend more time telling you what they think they did than letting you decide.
B. Hamilton is here to show you a good time of the classic rock variety, even if everything he’s believed in feels made out of cheap cardboard and ready to be blown away. B. Hamilton’s new music, however, reveals little of that misery inviting you for a nice dance instead.
What’s there to be so glum about? For B. Hamilton, it’s the realisation that early investors are the only ones with a chance of avoiding the inevitable fallback from a scam, no matter how elaborate.
Cosa Nostra may have paid for tickets to the new world, but those adventurers who spoke neither English nor Italian bought property in the Lower East Side. B. Hamilton’s “Back in the Line” is an ode to everyone who won’t be buying a trailer any time soon but who still thinks enough of the world to celebrate it with a dance.
Drew Friel – Sober
The world has a love affair with geniuses who endanger themselves needlessly. These characters are all potential world-beaters who care little about their talents, for whom the world has little to offer, and who, often find themselves in places that other, more sensible people, avoid. If only they, too, could enjoy their roles as anti-heroes, maybe they could get more satisfaction out of life.
On the other hand, these wreckless geniuses are a Heaven sent for all of the scriptwriters, novelists and musicians looking for inspiration. There are endless movies, books and songs about these kinds of people doing wonderful things, going against the odds, and being utterly blase about the whole thing. Usually, these stories happen in some kind of casino and, regularly, the hero has a drink in hand.
Drew Friel’s “Sober” sounds, first of all, like a very well-produced retro piece that ought to accompany a movie set in 1960s U.S.A. It suggests an expensive setting, a place where rich, smart people go away to lose their souls. But what’s even more remarkable is the choice of words. Friel’s lyrics describe the suave cool of the self-destruction process of a gifted individual. It’d make for a great novel.