ROBIN ADAMS – The Garden (Backshop Records BSRCD004)

The GardenThe Garden is the second album from a young singer-songwriter from Glasgow. He plays acoustic guitar and harmonica and is supported on one track by Pete Harvey on cello. I like the record but I’m also troubled by it and I’m going to say at the outset that this album needs a lyric sheet.

The title track, which opens the album, is ostensibly about boxing so ‘The Garden’ is presumably the one in that now stands on Pennsylvania Plaza. Of course, it could be about Vincent Van Gogh so there are multiple meanings; a deliberate ambiguity. Robin exhibits a rather Dylanesque turn of musical phrase here. The melody is, in places, a second cousin to ‘Chimes Of Freedom’ but none the worse for that. He switches immediately to a lighter romantic mood with ‘Paint Me The Day’, ‘Keep Me’ and ‘Troubled Skies’. I’m generally too old for this sort of thing and I might have given up on the record at this point but the last of these has a haunting quality which draws you back to it. I’ve re-evaluated this song several times.

Robin’s Dylan streak re-emerges on ‘Right To Run’ which borrows from ‘Walls Of Red Wing’. It’s a good song though, for me possibly the best on the album, with a complex message and here’s one place where I want to read his words as well as hear them. The same is true of ‘Street’ and ‘Holy Smoke’ (the song with the cello) – there’s poetry here that I need to assimilate.

If it’s true that an artist’s best material goes into the first leaving him or her scrabbling around for material when it comes to the second then Robin has done a fine job here. Let’s see where it takes him.

Dai Jeffries

Artist’s website: https://www.facebook.com/robinadamsband

‘Holy Smoke’ from The Garden:

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