URL: https://www.jennifertruesdale.com/
As light as a feather in the slow jam “Moving Mountains,” crushingly evocative in “Sunrise,” Jennifer Truesdale’s lead vocal is presented to us in a litany of ways in her rookie release Through the Circle, but one thing that listeners can count on finding in every performance on the album is brilliantly emotional lyrics and the perfect voice with which to sing them. Truesdale flexes some serious songwriting muscle in this LP, but even when she’s playing a cover, she brings so much passion into the booth with her that it doesn’t matter whether we’ve heard the song before or not.
Through the Circle is comprised mainly of original content, but it does include a couple of classic rock standards in “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” and “Love the One You’re With,” the latter of which boasts one of the best harmonies on the record. There’s a lot of focus on the backing band in both of these tracks, but none of the individual elements within the instrumentation are ever powerful enough to steal away the spotlight from the real treasure here – Truesdale’s incredible serenade. She’s quite the force to contend with, but the able cast of players she selected for her band does a fine job by any measurement.
The melodies tell us just as much of a story as any of the verses do in “Moving Mountains,” “I Need You Tonight,” “Thinking of You” and “My Life,” and while the lyrics are always a focal point in Through the Circle, these instrumentation of these tracks conveys a narrative completely independent from anything else here. They’re influenced by, and quite reminiscent of, a classic, midcentury-era pop music in this sense, but at the same time, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Truesdale is taking most of her cues from the iconic forerunners of her genre.
It’s strictly a cosmetic issue, but I don’t know that there needed to be quite as much polish on the mixes of “River to Nowhere,” “Sunrise,” “We Will Not Be Forgotten” and “Daydreaming” as there is. Jennifer Truesdale has a warm, organic tonality that doesn’t need to be adorned with the frilly production trinkets some of her contemporaries would employ in the studio; in her future works, I would really like to hear her take on some more stripped-down material that affords her vocal as much room to command our attention as it needs.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Through-Circle-Jennifer-Truesdale/dp/B07PQTWMHC
I wasn’t familiar with Ms. Truesdale before picking up a copy of Through the Circle just recently, but I’m excited to hear what she develops her sound into as she gets a little more comfortable with the identity she’s trying to forge for herself and her solo career. We can learn a lot about her artistry from “Love the One You’re With,” “We Will Not Be Forgotten,” “I Need You Tonight” and “Moving Mountains,” but something tells me that these songs are only a teaser of what’s going to come out of her camp in the near future. We’ll know for ourselves soon enough, but until then, Through the Circle is certainly a choice acquisition for pop fans around the world this December.
Troy Johnston