An album release from Timothy J. Fry gives us a lush classic rock experience with tons of character and a soundscape that beckons that vintage style of songwriting and all the aesthetic that comes along with it.
The Music Boulevard album is packed with heart, persona, and righteous guitar sections along with grooves that get you dancing and singing along with some of these tunes almost straight away.
You can clearly tell that this comes from a man who has a pure love for his craft and I don't just mean playing guitar or singing, but I mean songwriting because he's able to take all those real classic influences and infuse them into each song and almost a different way every single time.
Just listening to the album you can feel this energy that comes through almost like a live performance where the instruments are feeding off of each other and that in itself less the songs kind of come alive.
I do get a great nostalgic feeling when I listen to these tracks and can tell some of these bands that influenced this songwriter and artist but through it all he adds his spin and his own approach and with that you get surprises around the corners of the record along with layers that can be peeled back which is quite fun with the record like this.
The guitar tones alone across the span of this release are so perfect for the feel of the record that the whole thing becomes a sort of atmosphere that you can escape into for a little while and this is something that I've missed in certain kinds of genres for quite some time including rock music.
Being able to step out of your own reality and into someone else's for a bit is a wonderful feeling and I feel like that's what certain music is really meant for.
There are colorful and lush vocal harmonies all over this record along with hooks that bounce around in your brain for hours or even sometimes days after the songs have ended and the only way to satiate that is to listen to those songs again which in my opinion is just smart songwriting.
I think this kind of thing just comes to Timothy naturally though.
There's also this almost fantastical element to some of the songs and it gives the record a little bit of a cinematic approach too.
Is cinematic rock a thing? Well, it is now because that's what some of these songs feel like, and what I mean is, you can certainly hear them in different scenes of films or TV shows even.
There are certain songs that stick out as singles and stand on their own two feet very well without the rest of the record attached however, having said that, I do feel like this is the kind of album that you listen to from beginning to end because although it's not exactly a concept record per se, there is an experience that you have listening to the full album.
On top of that, if you grew up in a certain time. Like me, you also grew up with things like full albums on vinyl records or cassette tapes, then CDs of course.
This Record beckons the physical format and that's part of the nostalgia of this release because the rock music is so influenced by those kinds of bands that we grew up with that it just feels like it belongs in that category.
This belongs on a vinyl record so you can look at the front cover and read the lyrics on the insert.
There are some great messages across the record and I think that Timothy did an outstanding job of creating a rock album that has a perfect balance of color, drive, energy, and character.
Definitely check this one out as soon as you get a chance especially if you're a fan of classic rock music in general, and remember where you heard it first.