Wednesday July 7, 2021
American singer-songwriter Rusty Gear has just released his new EP Delivery Man.
With over one million Spotify streams and counting, Rusty continues to establish his brand of county rock. Recorded in Nashville and produced by Brad Hill, Delivery Man utilises Rusty’s pliant vocal style and equally accommodating songwriting techniques to create an assortment of tracks that veer from one end of the country spectrum to the other.
The new single from this set is the title track, which features another of Rusty’s characteristic narratives, allowing us a glimpse into the intrepidness and vulnerability of urban life as a modern-day survivor. But the EP reveals a lot more than classic country imagery and textbook musical sensibilities, perhaps most evident in tracks like Over The Pass and Open Sky.
A more self-reflective approach, as heard in the tracks Gold On The Horizon and We Know Too Much is what might endear the listener—the initiated and the newbie. For example, the candid nature of We Know Too Much, along with its stripped-back production, can entice by its appeal to common sense, logic, and emotional rawness. Coaxed on by a relaxed vocal performance and lush but unfurled instrumentation, the song’s critical line, ‘we know too much to feel that young again’, seems like a summation of the EP’s pulse: a light, legitimate romanticism ever-present amid the depictions of promised lands, pilgrims, and six-packs.
These two sides are, of course, not necessarily at odds; the contrast makes for a record that is well-tempered and disparate enough as far as groove, production, and performances are concerned. The songs contain traces of pure country, country pop and dashes of blues-rock that imbue most of them with an edge that is not so dominant that it subtracts from the main focus, which one can safely assume is the songwriting.
