Trevor Drury’s songs for his new EP Alice (It’s All in Your Head) are hallucinatory, though fiercely musical. The Tucson, Arizona-born, San Diego raised, Boston by way of London transplant harvests a rewarding bounty from his imagination and incorporates the EP’s six songs with a boundless sense of possibility. Alice (It’s All in Your Head) permits anything, so long as it serves the song.
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/trevordrurymusic/
The six tracks supply Drury with the necessary springboard for making a substantive statement. Alice’s material isn’t disposable pop tripe. These are full-throated imaginative expressions built to resonate long past an initial listen. “Alice (Wonderland Mix)” definitely fits that bill. Sparks fly off this cut as its near-industrial instrumentation clashes and clangs throughout the arrangement. It has a slightly abrasive tilt, but Drury wisely draws a memorable contrast. He intersperses straightforward cascading passages buffering each verse that sweetens what might otherwise be a much more difficult swallow for listeners.
“Like a Stone” takes a different approach. The surface charms of this song’s arrangement are far more readily agreeable, and Drury uses light sound effects with satisfying results. The second track values atmospherics, but he’s careful to never saturate the song in over-stylized studio gimmickry. It stands on its own as a substantial composition, concise, yet implying wider vistas than its three-minute and thirty-second running time allows.
Off-kilter funhouse piano bookends the EP’s third track, “Leviathan”, and Drury again makes excellent use of atmosphere. It imbues this portion of the song with a feverish temperament, never out of control, but lingering over the performance like a cloud. Several nearly outlandish transformations compromise the song’s body, but they nonetheless cohere into the EP’s most audacious musical moment. “Teenage Fantasy” isn’t as daring. However, Drury still traverses rarely traveled terrain skirting the borders of art rock and pop without ever planning a flag. The piano is the key instrumentation for this song, and the playing attacks the keys with an audibly percussive touch.
The closing tracks provide a perfectly conceived final statement. “Need” invokes its clear central theme, longing, lyrically and musically. Restless yearning fuels the mood of each instrumental passage without ever succumbing to fatal predictability; Drury expresses himself with great earnestness, but a measured compositional sense structures his songwriting, and his point of view reveals remarkable maturity. “Need” likewise reveals his growing ability to encapsulate rich musical worlds within limited song lengths.
You can’t pigeonhole him. The material won’t allow it. The closer “Lost” delivers listeners to spartan musical territory heretofore unexplored. However, Drury hits us with his finest vocal on the EP. It’s an impassioned and fully engaged performance that elevates an already fine song several notches higher. There are listeners who will be caught off-guard by the introduction of possibly unexpected influences, but they underline the track’s climatic demeanor.
It’s a fitting finale for one of the most impactful EP releases in recent memory. Eps are traditionally intended as near “samplers” for interested listeners with the hope that sneak previewing songs might lure them back for the longer release to come. However, Trevor Drury’s Alice (It’s All in Your Head) accomplishes more in six tracks than many collections twice as long.
Cleopatra Patel