by Ljubinko Zivkovic (@zivljub)
If you haven't paid attention to Sam Evian's previous three albums, maybe it is time you do with his fourth solo effort title asks you, and take the Plunge. Unless you don’t find yourself touched by that melodic stuff that the likes of Paul McCartney, Big Star, and a long line of similar artists plunged into before Evian. You see, as a renowned producer who has worked with the likes of Big Thief, Blonde Redhead, Cass McCombs, and Palehound, Evian has quite a keen ear for painstakingly constructing songs where a great melody is the key and everything else is embellishment intended to make a particular melody shine.
On Plunge, Evian starts to build his song constructions right from the opener “Wild Days,” slowly developing them, adding and subtracting additional elements as the music demands. This just might have something to do with the focused idea he came to the studio with, noting “I wrote the songs so that I could just play them and sing them on a guitar. I wanted them to be like really focused, classic songs.” That is particularly evident on more relaxed tunes like 'Rollin' In" where Evian gives the song exactly the arrangements it needs - all the instruments, particularly the keyboards and guitars, are exactly what it demands, with the addition of sax giving it that extra touch, like a strawberry on a top of the cake.
While you can sense where Evian's inspirations come from throughout the album, it is his meticulous craft that makes the songs not only stand out but gives them that personal individual touch to make them his own. The stellar support cast here that includes the likes of Liam Kazar, Sean Mullins, El Kempner of Palehound, and Adrianne Lenker, has the role to do just that, add the extra touch to songs without overshadowing Evian, just like the subtle vocal chorus on “Why Does It Take It So Long”. When you take the album as a whole, Plunge can fit both within those sometimes tritely constructed categories of “classic” and “modern” rock. Well, maybe in the sense that you cannot really define its timeline. All for the right reasons.