Richard Evans is best known as the keyboard player in James, but if you read that and are expecting to find anything like Sit Down on this album, you'll be sadly disappointed. Although thankfully this album is nowhere near as annoying as James were live the couple of times, I saw them. This album is a Synth pop concept album about the state of the world and climate change.
The album opens with Made Of Stars a very slinky almost wallpaper synth pop tune that has some dancefloor elements but almost sounds like it's made for the vapid generation to stare blankly at their phones in a bar too, rather than get up and dance together.
Brave New World takes Huxley's ideas as the template for an ice-cold synth wash song about our need to rid our Brave New World of plastics and find a more sustainable new way forwards.
2084 feels like it's robotic music for what by then may well be a robotic age, as half the planet may have sunk beneath the rising water levels, as Richard wonders what sort of population the world will have by then.
Trick Machine opens with a pulsing sound with glitterball synth, as Richard sings about space travel to the desolate wastes of background music, this is more likely to be, even as he nicks the odd line off The Carpenters, it's a shame the music feels so bland as the lyrics could easily be in something with more balls than this has.
The Last Of Us sounds like an early 80's synth dance-pop song that's had a drum pattern from the late 90's stuck onto it so it ends up being rather slight.
Black Rain is about the radioactive rain that fell after the atomic bombs went off in Japan, the tune is deceptively blank and sweet considering the subject matter and may well draw unsuspecting listeners in before they realize what it's about, if they listen to the lyrics closely enough.
All Fall Down is the tune that makes most sense of the Pet Shop Boys comparison in the press release, although on something that sounds as light and airy as this does the lyrics are a nice jarring contrast, as they All Fall Down felled by the atomic bomb, or covid or any number of other real or existential threats, for me this is probably the tune to listen too on this album.
The album closes with Constellation that gently stares through a telescope at the far-off vistas of deep space as it feels like you are gently floating off into the ether with the odd crackling noise for company.
Find out more at https://www.richard-evans.com/ https://richardevans.bandcamp.com/album/sentinel https://www.instagram.com/richardemusic/
