Joseph Shabason is a Toronto-based saxophonist. His new record, Welcome To Hell, is out now via Western Vinyl.
It’s often hard for me to fully engage with new records because so much of my time is spent playing catch-up and listening to all the classic old records I’ve missed over the years. But every so often, there is a new record that pops into my world that is so engaging and perfect that I basically just spend three weeks listening to it non-stop until I feel like I have properly digested and taken-in everything it has to offer. This year, that record was Allegra Krieger’s I Keep My Feet On The Fragile Plane.
There is a wide-open honesty and intimacy to this album that draws you in and makes you feel like you are getting a privileged look into the day-to-day of someone’s most intimate thoughts. Her sound is familiar… But the more I try to place her influences, the more I am convinced that she really exists in her own stylistic realm. The songs are not overblown or overly grand. They just exist in a world of subtlety and intimacy that very few songwriters can exist in without crossing over into corniness. On top of all that, the production is just perfect. Minimal arrangements and atypical horn pairings combined with a warm guitar sound that come together to form the backbone of this stark and beautiful album.
This one is for sure an all-timer for me.
