Album Review: John Gorka, ‘unentitled’
John Gorka’s warm baritone vocals wrap around us like a good friend’s hug, reminding us that our love can transcend whatever troubles us. The songs on his new album unentitled are companions on our journey through these troubled times, offering comfort and hope.
The album opens with the breezy “Favorite Place,” a bright ode to songwriting—“My favorite place is to be in the middle of a song”—and that in-between moment that opens into the joys of newness and possibility. Concentric circles of harmony vocals flow over the jazzy folk rhythms of the music, creating a catchy and memorable tune that plays on repeat in our hearts long after the track ends. With intricate strumming and picking, Gorka recreates an atmosphere of parlor music into which he sets Emily Dickinson’s poem, “A Light Exists in Spring.” The exquisitely spacious “Particle & Wave (Goodness in the World)” invites us to join the singers and dwell in somber music that reverberates in the soul. The most intimate song on an album of intimately rendered songs, “Particle & Wave (Goodness in the World)” arises out a sadness about personal and social ugliness that swells to joy in the repeated recognition that there is “goodness in the world” and that if people—individually (“particle”) and communally (“wave”)—embrace that goodness, change will come. Eliza Gilkyson joins Gorka on the defiant “Give Us Back Our Water,” an up tempo protest song about the poisoning of our water and air, based on a 2014 incident in Charleston, West Virginia, when the town’s drinking water was fouled by a chemical spill in the Elk River. On “Hold On,” swirling guitars mimic the darkness of times of lost hope as Gorka and Lucy Kaplansky’s harmony vocals tenderly urge tenacity and hopefulness in such times, for things will get better. Yet, as Gorka counsels, with the help of Alice Peacock’s harmony vocals, on the shimmering “Hope Doesn’t Fall Like Rain,” while hope doesn’t flow freely, it is worth our efforts to secure it. The album closes with a solo acoustic version of “Particle & Wave (Goodness in the World).”
Every song on unentitled is a gift, and some of them—like “Particle & Wave (Goodness in the World)”—could well serve as soundtracks to our individual and communal efforts to overcome the darkness of our time and shine the light of hope and love all around.
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unentitled is available HERE.
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