Robin Adams
Album: The Garden
Label: Backshop
Tracks: 10
Website: https://soundcloud.com/robin-adams

Glaswegian acoustic singer-songwriter Robin unveils his fourth studio album here, but he's a new name to me. The Garden is a kind of concept work, in that it takes much of its inspiration from the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh, a man whom Robin clearly greatly admires and whose ethic he deeply appreciates.

Robin's own style shares the fervent, if reliably distanced stance that really understands a man in torment, a man of wild energy whose creative expression is key to his uniquely communicative art. Through his songs, Robin is able to project, and comment meaningfully on, the character of the archetypal struggling artist, his desperately gloomy outlook that is however tempered with a heightened degree of self-realisation (Troubled Skies is possibly the album's most acute expression of this state). Musically, I'd reference the early work of Roy Harper or Bert Jansch rather than Nick Drake, and although there are some superficial similarities Robin's is arguably a more substantial and less wispily ethereal presence than the latter.

A more melancholy version of Paul Simon too, perhaps, comes to mind on songs like Keep Me. But in truth Robin's very much his own man, and the album is an intensely personal statement that lets the listener in gradually and confidentially, by virtue of its truth and immediacy. He keeps the settings simple and lucidly minimal too, with I presume all instruments (just guitars and bass for the most part, with very occasional, almost subliminal keyboard and percussion touches) played by Robin himself (the package credits only a cello part on one track, to Pete Harvey). It would have been good to have included the lyrics at least on the unduly skimpy digipack, clearly sung though they are - but that's my only criticism of this involving collection.

David Kidman