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Reviews - Aram - Splendid Ezine

With a musical sensibility shaped by the earnest, purple prose style of '70s singer-songwriter mainstays like James Taylor, Ghosts in a Season glides from the speakers like a warm night breeze through a car window. Traveling a peripatetic path down the backroads of Georgia, California, Alabama, Maine and points unknown, the album ultimately leads not to a destination, but to the haunted season of its title. Dwelling almost entirely in an autumn twilight, these narrators are shaded with longing and a desire to reconnect with the past. The jangly guitars of "Bigger Highway" add a touch of early REM to the album, which uses guitar, vocal, drums, and bass as well as piano and occasional strings. A few tracks sink: the gently evocative lyric of "I Can't Remember Your Name" ("I can't remember your name/but I remember you were beautiful") drowns in diabetes-inducing piano and strings. Aram's lyrics occasionally spill into cliché, but for the most part touch compelling and emotionally tender spots, like "November"'s opening line, "I was just thinking of the love/I was afraid to ask for/And I can hear that fear come/Knockin' down my back door." To call an album "radio-ready" can in these days of corporate radio be an outright insult, but an autumn evening, a country road and Aram's songs on the car radio could keep you driving all night.

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