ADRIAN NATION – Anarchy And Love (Laburnum Ridge LABAN040)

AnarchyAdrian’s fourth solo album (one of them is live), Anarchy And Love, began with the death of his father some four years ago. In a brief sleeve note he says that his father left many things behind and on the record are “some of the songs he left in me”. Happily for all of us this is not an album filled with grief but one that radiates optimism. Sure, the road isn’t always an easy one. The title track comes from Adrian’s time in Athens during the protests in 2012. Amongst the chaos he saw a small, but encouraging, seed of hope. You can call it a protest song, but its targets are not necessarily the obvious ones and the protest continues with ‘Dying Of Democracy’.

If Adrian wanted an uplifting start for the album he couldn’t have chosen better than ‘Rocket To The Moon’ in which the Scottish exodus to the New World “made this nation great”. It’s impossible to imagine the feelings of despair felt by the people setting out into the unknown but they did OK. Of course, the Macdonald brothers hadn’t heard of Donald Trump back then. The final song is another cover, Robert Burns’ ‘A Man’s A Man’, which encapsulates the same idea on a personal level – “The honest man though oh so poor is king of men for all that”.

Adrian is lauded as an acoustic guitar master and there are three solo instrumentals here but he’s now expanded his repertoire to include electric guitar. In the modern fashion, Anarchy And Love was recorded with musicians in several locations, notably Sardinia, Scotland and Canada where he’s developed quite a following in recent years and something has rubbed off on him. It took four or five tracks for me to work out what I was hearing in the back of my mind. It shouldn’t have taken so long since Adrian has cited Bruce Cockburn as one of his inspirations but sometimes he really channels the man.

Adrian is, to quote Burns, a “man of independent mind” and, while there is a bit of Bruce in ‘The Benderloch Stone’ for example, the ideas and the words are definitely Adrian’s. This is another excellent album from a writer and performer who really should be much better known.

Dai Jeffries

Artist’s website: www.adriannation.com

‘The Benderloch Stone’ – live:


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