Perhaps because he’s Scottish, perhaps because his self-titled album is split into Side A & B, or perhaps because of the intrinsic folksiness of his project, I can’t help but draw an equivalence with Dale and Ian Anderson. Of course, I’m not saying that Dale’s self-titled project is identical or equal to Jethro Tull’s magnum opus, ”Thick As A Brick”. But there are similarities to be had, similarities that when identified only lend you to appreciate the part-time musician’s full release that much more.
To lend a bit of context to Dale, he’s a Glasgow based singer-songwriter who works as a fireman by day. Also working a bit as a book-publisher, Dale slowly accrued enough money to actually release his music. To him, the songs he writes are cathartic — they allow him to express his emotion and who he is outside of a day job that compels him to repress it all.
Unsurprisingly then, his self-titled EP is all about escapism, with a bit of love sprinkled in for good measures. It’s reflective of his own journey, but also a collective exploration of working-class life that serves as an outlet for expressing the woes that come alongside it. Each of the five songs on the record are linked, telling a story through a day in the life of a story told through recordings of a trip to the sea. In that vein, Dale’s tale for the everyman bears a bit of Springsteen in it.
‘It was hard growing up in my town‘ sings Dale at the start of Side A. It’s about as indicative a first line as you can get for an album like his. Dale feels like he’s reading a storybook through this record, narrating tales of the working class man frustrated and angered at the way the world around him seems to have come up. On the second track of Side A, the production elevates to a new level. As he sings, ‘they must have married the wrong one’, there’s a wonderfully euphoric guitar interplay that goes off. Towards the end of Side A, you can start to hear the sea a bit more, the crashing of waves set to the backdrop of a wonderfully soothing acoustic guitar playing impeccable folk chords.
Side B takes a marked divergence from the rest of the project, standing as a short fiction audio story told with the sound of the sea behind it. As the co-founder of Speculative Books, an independent publisher of novellas and poetry, Dale wanted to inject some of that passion into his album. Together, Dale’s self-titled EP sounds a bit out of place in today’s climate, but in a great way.
It’s an album that seems far too sincere, honest, and imaginative for a manufactured era. Check it out when it releases this Friday!
Check my playlists here!