On last year's Alone at the Microphone, the second album for the Canadian
combo Royal City, the outfit staged evocations of the grand old Canadian cowboy
Neil Young. This time around, they've essentially invited Crosby, Stills, and
Nash along; Little Heart's Ease chases grander sounds, swelling arrangements,
and rousing choruses, with "My Body Is Numbered, She Will Come," and, particularly, "Ain't
That the Way" all finding the fellows in this outfit hitting nasal harmonies
in support of frontman Aaron Riches, who comes up with some richer melodies and
nattier tunes to match this newfound predilection for golden-country sounds and
multi-part refrains. Using their newfound larger profile (thanks, Rough Trade!)
for good instead of evil, here Royal City rope in plenty of piano, percussion,
pedal-steel, strings, Hammond, handclaps, horns, and even some black-heart'd
banjo, those three aforementioned songs all going so far as to bang-a-gong in
support of the cause (no, really). As the The-Band-esque band builds up arrangements
a kid could "grand" with ease, Riches, too, seems to be setting his sights higher,
as songsmith, his words and choruses more forthright, this developing development
meaning he's also coming out of the Christian closet a little. Whilst there are
lots of lyrical uses of the word "he" in which he's likely singing "He," it's
on "Jerusalem" that Riches goes for the wall, the song finding the frontman at
wail with the sentiments "With the drawing of this love/ Your body and your blood
will be on my tongue." As well as "He," Riches isn't above using "ye," either,
the proffered press-release-offering being that Riches is trying to author songs
that make him sound like an Old Testament preacher. Although a more sensible
suggestion might be that he's fallen under the sway of folksong and blues form
like every other Harry Smith box-set buyer these days. Aside from Riches' rich
language, there's not much traditionalism on the album, it being more concerned
with stumbling in melancholy fashion through murmured countryish balladry. The
closest the disc comes to folk balladeering is, probably, the Willy O-ish closer, "Take
Me Down to Yonder River," where the songwriter uses images like "to scatter blood
on your stone" and "the flesh of hate that sticks to me" to speak, to God, of
a death he knows not, and of his fears of what that circumstance may bring.
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