Scivic Rivers is the latest project of singer songwriter Randy Bickford who was member of The Strugglers, this is his seventh album. It was recorded in Winston-Salem and Durham North Carolina with help from Charles Cleaver, Daniel Faust, John Pfiffner, Jimmy Thompson and Solter with guest appearances from Pete Pawsey, Wendy Allen, James Phillips and a few others. The artwork is probably best viewed with a set of 3-d glasses even if it wasn't created exactly like that.
This eases in with a very gentle evocative strummed guitar at the opening of High Season with Randy Bickford's rich tones full of potent imagery, for the sort of High season he's singing about, that is very different from High Season in London, as this isn't about garden parties, horse races or May balls, but more about the battle between the peaceful and the powerful, even as he tells you the first rounds on him, as the gentle pain tinkles away, the guitar gently peaks.
Our kin is one of the songs about Randy's dad and his losing battle with lung cancer, this is mellow thoughtful and full of the pain and sorrow of loss wrapped in carefully picked guitars and restrained drumming.
Frontier Forever has a funky bassline that the harmony vocals sit easily on top of, as this song of the timeless quality of the rivers flowing by conjure up. as the water crosses frontiers people at times may not, while asking questions about the nature of those borders, this breaks down in the middle before slowly building back, as if the rivers have started to swell once more after a storm has passed.
Caught Up Blues has a slight almost not there feel to the opening, as he asks difficult questions about why his father put dead bolts on all the doors when he was 15, figuring out the answer to that question is at the core of this tune, as Pete Pawsey's harmonica comes in to help the sound swell.
Born Outside is about the birth of Randy's first child while relating it to his early feelings growing up, imagining how much the world has changed between his early life and his babies one, have things got better or worse, why is progress so stubborn, musically this very pretty, as he worries that he's spent most of his life blowing his inheritance rather, than preparing to pass something on to his own kith and kin.
Shenandoah Granite has the sound of a song written while out hiking in the mountains, where you just sit down and write a few lines before continuing to hike, every time you pause, you write another verse or two, hoping to capture the beauty you see around you, then reflecting that beauty within the soundscape created to go with this as you hope your baby will understand where this is coming from once they are old enough.
Blood Vessel is the second tune on the album with a funk edge to it, as Randy asks all sorts of questions about the nature of blood, his relationship through blood with his baby, as the chilled-out funk blues accentuate everything going on in the lyrics.
The album closes with Instruction After The Fact a slow rumination on the plethora of advice on both how to deal with becoming a parent or with losing a parent, both events you can never really prepare for, the spare arrangement, barely there guitar and vocals is perfect for the deep thoughtful musings on good or bad memories, no matter what you thought it would be like, it’s not, this has echoes of Elbow or Tindersticks plangent sorrowful despair among the joy.
Find out more at https://www.scivicrivers.com/ https://scivicrivers.bandcamp.com/album/scivic-rivers https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009974897060 www.potluckfoundation.com
