Luke Brindley
Crazy Grace
(Self-Released)
Spare, sparse, and stripped down to the essentials, Luke Brindley’s latest album finds him relying on the three things most essential to his sound—his adept fingerstyle fretwork, his vulnerable vocals, and his touching and tender melodies. “I wanted the guitar arrangements and lyrics to have the focus,” he insists, and indeed, there’s nothing to detract from his simple but assured delivery. Recorded in an empty house on the New Jersey shore during the winter of 2021, it reflects a sense of isolation, one that finds Brindley in a decidedly meditative mood. Songs such as “What’s Not To Love?,” “Let Me Be Your Fool,” “Midnight in the Pines,” and “The Light In Your Eyes” come across as poignant and personal, bare expressions of optimism tinged with insecurity spun with abject humility. On the other hand, when he turns his attention to the tumult and turbulence of a divided nation on closing track “Hope Machine,” the effect is all the more mesmerizing.