Jakob Battick and Kyle Gervais popped on their headphones and gave Travis Cyr‘s new record, All the Best Things in Life a bunch of listens for this week’s review. Check out what they had to think of it below this drop.
Jakob Battick
Travis Cyr, Northern Maine’s pseudo-hermit songwriter and Arootsakoostik visionary, has one of the oddest folk-music visions in Maine. His choices in arrangement, narrative, and texture aren’t strange in some highfalutin way, but in deeply subtle and unusual ways. Little things on this album, in particular, reveal his unique musical sensibilities. Strange electronic sounds pop up here and there between passages, and his lyrics bely a transformative and fantastic perspective that’s nothing short of classic cosmic americana-level stuff. ‘Sabretooth’ is both chilling and wildly vivid, painting a multi-faceted and gorgeous lyrical portrait that one could easily get lost in for quite some time, analytically speaking.
In all honesty, there’s not much here to not like. Cyr has a growl that is at once deep-set and delicate, and his melodies are both pretty and atypical enough to reward repeated listens. The production too, provided by Frank Hopkins, is fantastic to my ears. It’s both grassroots and polished. Backing voices crop up beautifully and humbly from the wings, without being polished to suffocating perfection, and odd floating sounds hover in and around Cyr’s guitar and voice. Again, it’s strange in the way that it sounds traditional while also being decidedly ‘now’ and ‘forward.’ The fusion of a briskly-strummed acoustic guitar and looped, reverberated electric guitar on the title track is particularly gorgeous and unexpected. Cyr has produced a wonderful, mature, and singular work of Northern Maine folk music, written specifically for our day and age.
Kyle Gervais
Travis Cyr has got a fantastic voice. It doesn’t do lots of fancy things or sound like anything you haven’t heard before, it just consistently works, acting as the guiding force through these folksy, roots-rock tunes. While the instrumentation is typical (banjo, mandolin, acoustics) and well-played, there is the occasional offness in how tight things are which adds a bit of extra charm, showing that these songs were played by real people who got a bit too excited and had to find their way back to the beat. While that may sound sloppy, it’s actually quite appealing. Well, it might be sloppy if the songs weren’t as strong.
While I find this record’s back end to contain its strongest moments, the first half also has its peaks. “Sabertooth” holds down a nasty beat (courtesy of Nate Cyr and Chuck Prinn) and shows that though this is an acoustic based record, it can still have a little bit of an edge. The title track is surprising in how much it accomplishes with an acoustic, an electric, and a whole lot of vocals. But once you hit “You,” it’s over with.
“If I Had a Mountain” is catchy and melodic, with strong lyrics to compliment Cyr’s voice, and “Providence” is the standout. At over five minutes, it builds off an urgent light groove to Mac-ian choruses and a jamtastic solo section, both of which I do not mean as negatives. “Teacher and King,” the last real song before the instrumental “Coda,” closes things out simply but with some muscle. With hard, quick-strummed guitar, harmonica and a boatload of lyrics, Cyr sends you out with another reminder about the best things in life. This is a guy who knows what he’s doing, loves what he’s doing, and has been doing it long enough to do it his own way. It works.
Take a listen below!
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