Album Review: Calum Scott – Avenoir
2 min read
Britain’s Got Talent hopeful turned international superstar Calum Scott has had a continuous rise in the ten years since his initial success. His golden buzzer winning cover of Robyn’s Dancing On My Own, as well as his own five-time platinum selling single You Are The Reason, firmly secured Calum on the map. Now he’s retuned with third studio album Avenoir.
The album opens with Lighthouse, a slow-building piano led power ballad that unleashes at the chorus. Vague sentiments about his partner’s love being a lighthouse are followed by a subtly more in-depth evaluation in At Your Worst, a driving soft rock piece. Calum’s highly processed voice soars over the instrumentation. Roots has a clear rock influence with heavy chugged guitars in the choruses, but it also takes from the mid 2010s playbook but incorporating a folky acoustic riff and bouncy kick-snare drum pattern. God Knows and Unsteady fly by, each with false-start intros and excellent vocal deliveries. My World and Die For You take the album’s ballads to the next level, the former kicking into overdrive at the midway point while the latter relies completely on Calum’s voice, only introducing more instrumentation towards the song’s climax.
One More Drink has the album’s only living feature, that being pop-turned-country star Lauren Alaina. The pair’s voices work perfectly together in the drink-infused love song. Peripheral Vision bounces along on a crunchy guitar riff and punchy percussion, before the piano ballads return for Lose Myself, Gone, and Mad. The three tunes are capped off with a wonderful instrumental piece, the title track, which swells with strings and acts as a full stop to the album. There is, however, one final track. A cover of Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody, featuring the woman herself. Far be it from us to talk about the moralities of singing with an artist who can’t consent to the collaboration due to being deceased, it is a beautifully arranged and well done cover that doesn’t detract from the original.
Avenoir is a quick and breezy pop record that sits firmly with its modern chart-topping contemporaries. There’s nothing here to set Calum apart, but what’s on offer here has been produced with a fine-tooth comb and presented with all the sheen expected from a singer of this caliber.
Writer and Musician, Ryan Bulbeck has been published with a number of online publications, and has worked with a myriad of great artists, both as a performer, and as a producer. His most recent band The 295 are still active, playing shows around the UK.
