Think Like A Key 2025
Transatlantic troubadour of urban toils and troubles ventures down memory lane or two to map his microcosm.
Astor Place
Edward Rogers has never been afraid to seem parochial on his albums – the British-born New Yorker referred to a specific area on 2008’s “Sparkle Lane” and was photographed in a particular street on the cover of “Glass Marbles” in 2017 – for a simple reason: it’s in life-based locales that universal truths reside. Edward may not have nine lives, but each of his previous platters tapped into one, while Rogers’s ninth bridges both sides of his intercontinental existence – without plumbing the tectonic-plate depths and preferring instead to look inside the artist’s very psyche, the mental substance tightly tied to where he was earlier and is now. Tracing this record’s title and acid-scorched, orch-pop, kitschy-catchy opener to the musician’s Manhattan haunt and the “All The Young Dudes”-exuberant, piano-rippled penultimate track “15 Eldon Road” to his childhood home in Birmingham will help understand the singer-songwriter’s world, yet the listener won’t require any global positioning system to orientate here.
There’s no such prominent guests as Roger McGuinn this time around, because Edward felt it important to surround himself with friends that provide more than a sympathetic instrumental backdrop to Rogers’s velveteen voice, elevating “On The Other Side Of The Rainbow” – by enveloping vocals and piano in brass – first to a heartfelt ode to happiness and then to a farewell to a dream, and forming a stately, albeit not devoid of hidden drama, finale. His wide-eyed awe and reveries fill the acoustically tinctured “Magical Drum” whose strum and wordless refrains sear themselves in the audience’s mind, but the otherwise rarefied “Tears In My Martini” offers mighty twang, sharp riffs and infectious handclaps to banish sorrow from the fold which Edward’s pipes shape. However, if the strings-drenched “The Olde Church” channels the “Eleanor Rigby” spirit, and the lysergic “Romeo” switches to rambunctious rocking, “I Walk Behind Your Shadow” marries chamber gloom to country picking to spice up Rogers’s passionate delivery of platitudes-dispersing lyrics and make the results truly special.
Indeed, “Astor Place” is a place to be – no matter where you are.
****1/4
