Album Review: Foy Vance – The Wake
2 min read
Irish singer-songwriter Foy Vance has been on the scene now for over two-decades and still is managing to produce some of the finest folk, rock, and blues today. He saw wide acclaim with his second album, 2013’s Joy of Nothing, and since then has consistently toured and released new music. Now, after nearly five years, his latest release, The Wake, has dropped.
The album opens with the mammoth A.I. which, as the name suggests, tackles the terrifying and somewhat inevitable takeover of artificial intelligence. Lyrically, it’s a dower start to the record, but the lumbering bluesy riff and gentle groove that begins the track and the growing choir that rises further in are thoroughly enjoyable. Hi, I’m The Preacher’s Son is an acceptance of who you are from how you were raised, soft padded drums and Foy’s gritty vocals giving its themes conviction. I Think I Preferred The Question builds up on piano chords, always rising but never quite reaching the precipice, while We Almost Made It continues the plodding nature of the previous tunes. It’s a well-paced, gorgeously instrumented and mixed song, the opposite to following track I’m Not Celebrating which strips everything back to vocals and acoustic and lets Foy lament the passing of time.
Ever Feel Like Everybody’s Just Coming At You? feels like an interlude, reminiscent of Gotye with a falsetto vocal melding with a deep rumbling one that adds to the discomfort of the song’s sentiment. Call Me Anytime is a beautiful song dedicated to his daughter, while I Ain’t Sold On Time reintroduces the choir, Foy embracing Van Morrison both in arrangement and performance. Both Money and Sleazy Bastards take on a jazz-esc quality, the former morphing more into soul as the groove takes off while the latter stays on course with upright bass and brushes. Fiberoptic Love’s warped piano and programmed choral passages give an extra coldness to its lines about online relationships, before the real organ opens up the track at the end. The final two tracks When I See You At The Right Time and Bathed In Light end the record on a light and joyous note, especially where the latter track is concerned.
The Wake is a wonderful return for Foy Vance. Its heavy subject matter is laid out in consumable chunks, interweaved between excellent instruments mixed to perfection. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it experiments enough to keep things interesting, and is overall a fantastic collection of songs.
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.
