As if to prove an important point about how the solo singer-songwriter can fall into the same old sounds and sonic traps that people have been vaguely repackaging for fifty years, “Eighteen”, the opener and perhaps the album’s tone-setting track, shows brilliantly how to meet the modern pop, rock, and indie worlds head-on and play them at their own game.
Forget the usual image of an earnest, uptight acoustic strummer, the wide-brim-hatted, skinny-jeaned indie kid pretending that it’s still the Summer of Love, Sean Kennedy takes the genre somewhere far more interesting, a cross-genre space that feels both forward-thinking and emotionally unguarded, a way of making music that is both vibrant and vulnerable.
From this fabulous opening salvo, these meeting of ’90s rock nostalgia and modern pop accessibility, capturing both the ache of time slipping away and the quiet grace of letting go, he embarks on his mission to demonstrate how such music can, and indeed must, evolve with the times.
To this end, the record maps out a vivid emotional terrain: the slow-burning, ever-evolving rise of “Insane”, the self-protective firewalls and mature pop-rock sound of “Break”, the compassionate note to a younger self and clever dance-pop blends that make up “Been There Too”, and the cinematic farewell of “Rear View”
Kennedy isn’t just flirting with genre boundaries to color his music; he’s rewriting, resetting, and retrieving them, song by song. The result is an album that wears its lyrical heart plainly on its sleeve yet sonically refuses to be pinned down, equal parts intimate and ambitious, a collection of confident and cleverly woven pop-smart, indie-cool, and rock-aware music.
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