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Review: 'Aaron Beckum'
'Songs In A Triangle Room'   

-  Label: 'Devil In The woods records/bandcamp'
-  Genre: 'Folk' -  Release Date: '21.2.20.'

Our Rating:
This is an album that could be very lazily reviewed indeed by saying that Filmaker Aaron Beckum is the latest act to be saddled with being described as the new Dylan but lets face it that applies to every acoustic singer songwriter since the start of the 1960's so I'll have to try a bit harder than that.

The album opens with the sparsely strummed Mountains wherein Aaron is being turfed out and has nowhere to go and is hoping for a little redemption as he sits and looks at those Mountains and lives with his fears and he sounds a bit like John Wesley Harding.

Born Forlorn is a downbeat tale of wanting to get rid of his Mobile phone and go old school disconnected from the modern world and back to some sparsely populated world where he won't have to deal with the woman who no longer wants him while listeners can play a game of which Dylan tune this is a subtle re-working of.

Airport Cemetery Blues brings to my mind memories of seeing Cemeteries cut into the side of a hill just outside an airport in either Rome or Madrid and strangely I can think of several other airports with cemeteries close by that makes this song far more universal that you might of thought it's also the first song on the album to be more than just an acoustic strum having some cool keyboards sounds like the whooshing overhead of planes.

Jagged Coast seems to be comparing his live to a jagged coast full of rocks and cliffs and inlets and other forms to keep everyone else away from you so you can retreat into your phone. Aaron seems to have some issues with modern phone culture and well that's totally understandable it also reminds me a bit of Robert Chaney's Cracked Picture Frames album.

Obsolete is about someone not adhering to upgrading all there tech every six months and still using a typewriter or old school pre-windows computer etc, so this should probably be released as a cassingle or a 10" single that plays at 78RPM, I do hope it was recorded on a DAT player while he has another side swipe at the phone obsessed kids he meets.

New Moon Night is the most Dylanesque song on the album which is no bad thing apart from I sit here singing different words to Aaron's lyrics as he dreams of shifting sands and looking up searching for that New Moon.

Flowers Dead In The Vase is a lament for an ex who would rather be taking selfies than talking to her boyfriend which either means they are a real narcissist or Aaron is really boring to hang around with, you can make up your own mind about that, as he gently strums his way through this. Sadly his suggestion that the ex is walking on air in her pics isn't doing so in the same way Angry Johnny & the Killbillies suggest in Waltzing On Air even if Aaron might think that was a good idea.

Whisky Pyramid that closes this mini album sees him staring at the bottom of that bottle hoping for a little redemption from drinking his whisky in that pyramid, only I have an image in my head of him sitting under one of those 1980's pyramids that new age types used to chant and meditate underneath rather than being in that triangle room the album is named after.

Every time I've listened to this album and then gone to do something else at least one song has been stuck in my head which is always a good sign.

Find out more at https://aaronbeckum.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-a-triangle-room www.aaronbekum.com http://www.devilinthewoods.mx/artists/aaron-beckum
  author: simonovitch

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