Eve Adams – American Dust

Basin Rock

American singer-songwriter Eve Adams‘s third full-length release really is evocative of her recently found new home in the California desert.

With just a little help from Oliver Hamilton on violin and Gamaliel Traynor‘s cello, she conjures up ten windswept songs of yearning and love with a voice that is warm and worn but bright like the desert sun. Mostly on acoustic guitar or piano with some string embellishments, the songs echo through the desert canyons, moving languidly, shimmering guitar often sparing through the thin desert air.

In places the lyrics are lovely and on “Couldn’t Tell The Time”, she muses on whether it is half-past school bells or quarter to wedding chimes over a horse-trot rhythmic strum and sweet backing vocals; while on the homespun “Rather Be Here”, the question “What’s out there anyway?” accompanies stripped-back bleached-bone guitar and wavering harmonica. Where the piano appears, it can be funereal, as on the eerie “Strangers”, while “Get Your Hopes Up” is like a genteel take on bar-room rock’n’roll.

Keening fiddle and lonely cello accompany the strummed guitar on “Dirty Thirties”, while a freight train blows through the pointillist picked guitar of “Amen!”, the pleasing backing vocals bringing a jaunty, folky element to proceedings. What sounds like a harpsichord trembles through “Ricochet”, its circular waltz-like motion bringing to mind the melancholy of The Black Heart Procession and this melancholy is innate in some if not all of the songs here, particularly the lushly romantic “Ask Me”. There is even a touch of percussion on the closer “Death Valley Forever”, with swathes of harmonica for that essential sense of distance.

This is a great outing for an artist that can change her mood depending on circumstance and one who is really going from strength to strength. The desert never sounded so appealing.

-Mr Olivetti-