“The Lonesome Side of Town” – Ed Dupas

4 stars (out of 5)

0

It’s fair to say I’m not a prolific reviewer; it’s all about the process. The first listen to an album decides whether it moves me enough to review it, then it gets another five or six listens before I make some notes, track by track. Then I look at the press release and lyric sheets, sleeve notes and anything else that came with the songs. It’s just the way I do it and it throws up some interesting little insights. And there are some artists that you look forward to reviewing because they always make you think very carefully about their work; Ed Dupas is one of those artists. He writes a lot of songs about relationships, happy or sad, but you know that each album will have one song that digs deep and pulls out a reaction to the world that surrounds us. We’ll get to that in a while.

Most of the songs on “The Lonesome Side of Town” fall into genres that can be labelled as country, rock or some combination of the two. Country’s the dominant force on this album with arrangements featuring pedal steel, lap steel, banjo and resonator, but the addition of a Hammond B3 adds another dimension, taking the sound into The Band territory. And let’s not forget the Merseybeat feel of “Love Me Right”, with its chiming guitars and sus4 chords.

Of the eleven songs, ten are deeply personal, dealing with aspects of a relationship breakdown and one, “State of the Nation”, placed in the dead centre of the album, is the zeitgeist song. Ed Dupas doesn’t do a lot of these, but when he does, they hit, and they hit hard. “State of the Nation” is an out-and-out rocker about the divide between the people who work and the people who benefit from that work. It’s no frills rock ’n’ roll fired out in less than three minutes and it brings to mind Bob Seger’s 1978 song “Feels Like a Number” – well, Ed does live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As an example of the level of detail in the production, rather than crashing the over-driven guitar in at the beginning of the second verse, it’s faded in just before the beginning of the verse so that it reaches the right level just as the verse begins; just a little touch, but it works perfectly.

But that’s not to belittle the rest of the album. The title song sets the mood for the album as it tells the familiar story of a relationship with a performer, while “It All Sounds like Leaving” could only ever be a country song, particularly with the line ‘Let’s get on with the grieving, cos it all sounds like leaving’. Ed admits to agonising over the track order and losing one song that didn’t fit, and that confirms the message that it more than just a bunch of songs – it’s an album and there are subtle links between the songs. There are three references to ‘within’ or ‘between the lines’ and “On my Way” refers back to “It All Sounds like Leaving”. The more you dig, the more you find.

“The Lonesome Side of Town” is a beautifully-crafted set of songs coming out of a difficult situation. There are songs of heartache, a song of anger and some songs of redemption and moving forward. They are all songs of passion.

“The Lonesome Side of Town” is released in the UK on Friday October 25th on Road Trip Songs.

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