CD Review of...
Wes Tucker
Tradition
By: Alexandra Harris
Wes Tucker’s album, Tradition, is like a long-term relationship: it starts off great and goes through hills of happiness and sorrow before it eventually peters off. Tucker holds nothing back as he opens with a guitar solo in “What I Have,” the album’s opening track. The opening chords reveal Tucker’s rock, blues and folk influences. He incorporates a lot of bass and guitar solos throughout the rest of his album. While almost all of the tracks on Tradition open with a guitar solo, the sound varies. Songs such as “Come Home to Me,” and “Redeemed” are slower, longer notes and more somber. Others like “Tradition” and “Lead Me On” are edgy, sharp, guitar that pierces the ear.
Tucker is careful not to throw all of his styles out at once. He reveals them slowly, speeding up and then slowing down the pace of the album with a ballad. While tradition may be redundant and boring, Tucker’s Tradition never gets old because there is always something new on each track from a harmonica solo on “Tides” to the instrumental track, “Leota.”
It isn’t only Tucker’s musicality that makes the album worth listening to. He shares his opinions about material goods in “What I Have,” singing: “It’s our obsession to possess our possessions/when they just end up owning you,” or crooning about relationships gone bad on “Out of My Hands”: “She lies still, still wishing she had the words to say/just to explain how things ended up this way.”
He offers closure to the erratic relationship with “Good Night,” a ballad about closing a relationship—“But for now you’re far away/and I’ll just have to bide my time/but when you leave my side/you never leave my mind.”