This album follows Casey Neill & the Norway Rats’ fourth full-length album ‘Sending Up Flares’from 2023. While that album was an electric, full band production, this one is more intimate and mainly an acoustic solo work.
Of the tunes themselves, the Portland, Oregon-based songwriter says "Where Sending Up Flares is sonically and thematically about forging ahead, these ones face the other direction from the places we are now to the places we've been." Time Zero Land is named after the Polaroid Time-Zero Onestep SX-70 Land camera.
These are journeyman songs even though the destination is not always clear. As Neill sings in The Mallow Road, “We’re all travellers in isolation.”
A strong affinity towards nature and the threats to the world’s environmental wellbeing is reflected in The Distance Ahead a song influenced by Richard Powers' wonderful novel ‘The Overstory’.
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The songs have a plaintive and emotionally nuanced quality. Neill’s voice sounds like a lonesome Michael Stipe or a Pacific Northwest version of Bruce Cockburn. However, he also taps into Irish roots for The Rocks of Bawn an 18th century ballad drawn from the repertoire of sean-nós singer Joe Heaney.
This is a strong collection of committed songs which are full of wisdom. “Every cynic is an idealist betrayed”, is a line from The Eastside, a tune featured in acoustic and electric versions.
Anyone cynical about the merits of singer song writing would do well to give this fine album a listen.
Casey Neill’s website
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