THREE LOVE SONGS IN EARS OF MICHAEL HANSFORD

This is the first album review I have ever done. It will be short.

So I decided to walk around in this Southern Ontario snowstorm in the east end (no sidewalks in sight) whilst listening to Ricky Eat Acid’s newest LP for the very first time. I will also record my efforts when I get home. The time is 9:47pm.

As I walk down King Street in London Ontario during the heaviest snowfall of the winter I am completely swallowed by Ricky Eat Acid’s newest release “”Three Love Songs”” from the emerging Brooklyn based label: Orchid Tapes from Warren in Foxes In Fiction – I am connected. Sam Ray (also from Julia Brown and other jam acts from the area) has been known from myself as quite the limbed artist in our world. He can go from every angle from surreal and abstract – to literal and crisp to make it completely his own; seemingly effortless this man has undeniable talent.

Once in a while in the deep midst of this dark and ill world; something arises from the ashes in debris of the minimum wage life – something is born from the pain. And this album rises from surface of this benign void. This album does this to me. You can’t help but correlate your own sadness and what you think your worth within it.

Personally what I get from his newest release is something sadder and more excavated than any ambient release I’ve heard since some of Eno’s “”Apollo”” releases or even bleeding from the same veins from Ambient Krautrock releases from the 70’s (Cluster Neu and Bowie’s “”Low”” album that was inspired by the Krautrock mania).

There is something untowardly bare in “”Three Love Songs”” catharsizes of melancholic noise.

The album also features another Orchid Tapes beauty; Infinity Crush in the track “”It will draw me over like it always does”” which sounds like something you could mesh together on a walk in the streets of Mumbai when all the street musicians original merge together to create something entirely your own. Sam really has aligned so many genres into one with Three Love songs and the work and self-evaluation from his previous releases is finite and clear. The track “”Inside your house it; will swallow us too””  is the heaviest hitting composition in this great piece. It brings me to high school on the mornings after waking up from doing a new drug for the very first time or having lost your virginity to the wrong individual. It illuminates the regrets from my past while at the same time showing us a door or window on how to carry on with perseverance. The noise has a pulse on the hard-working DIY individuals that will admit they write for themselves to help themselves. It is beautiful.

Sam Ray is someone to look out for.

& Three Love Songs will find you. You have no choice.

Text by Michael Hansford

Photos by Ricky Eat Acid