Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Nostalgia was once regarded as a dangerous disease of the mind, an overpowering yearning of regret and sentimentality, actively warned against and sometimes, unfairly, cruelly, the person displaying such curios and tempers of the emotion, would be avoided for want of spreading the feeling as if it was an infection, a sickness that would cause society to become ill.
It is to those who see the past and the good it held, that nostalgia is a persuasive beauty that must be cared for, to keep moments in the spotlight where you can draw inspiration from is the point of memory, not to be dismissed, not just to act as a mental image to be used as instruction and then let go like a kite lost to the air, but to feel, to hold, to be surrounded by as the occasion calls so that a person can understand what something meant to them at the time.
For Nicki Bluhm, the sense of nostalgia, of the exercise of conjuring images to which country rock sits generously within, is one that is powerful, intensely gorgeous, and one that stirs up a fascinating response from the listener’s own ache for a time when all around them was not immersed in a torture of expansive unbelief.
In Ms. Bluhm’s latest recording, the sheer delight of Avondale Drive is to be explored with wide open eyes and a mind ready to accept that wistfulness is not a crime, but a virtue, that melancholy is not the same as misery, a state of mind that only those who seek to put down someone else’s experience in fear of being enlightened to a world in which longing is a threat.
Across tracks that play with insightful wit and observation, such as Love To Spare, Sweet Surrender, Juniper Woodsmoke, Mother’s Daughter, Leaving Me (Is The Loving Thing To Do), and Wheels Rolling, Nicki Bluhm captures the essence of memory, of a nostalgic feeling designed to leave you in the lap of hope whilst understanding that at times going ‘back there’ might leave you dealing with the confrontational and the challenging.
An album of absolute strength and purpose, Nicki Bluhm stands tall in the shadows of Avondale Drive.
Ian D. Hall