SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: THORIN LOEKS – IN THIS PLACE

Thorin Loeks
In This Place
Independent

Making travelogues in musical form sounds exactly like something a singer/songwriter should do. You are presenting an outlook on what you see before you while you’re more or less constantly on the move. Basically, you try to relate your reactions to the world around you, and it becomes very personal. Such concepts can be a double-edged sword. It can turn into something quite remarkable, or it could end up as being completely boring to put it simply.

Luckily for Yukon singer/songwriter Thorin Loeks on his album In This Place he presents his travelogue, but takes all the right (musical) paths. On a record, such travelogue might be imaginary, but for Loeks it was a real-life experience. You see, before recording the album, Loeks had bicycled and canoed over 15,000 km across North America with a guitar on his back, and you can sense that natural, on the move feel in the title tracks or the songs like “Open Sky”.

Sure, Loeks has some big Canadian singer/songwriter shoes to fill, and let’s not go any further than Gordon Lightfoot, whose songwriting and singing style Loeks reminds of at times here. But then, this reminder is not in the form of mimicking or copying, because Loeks sounds like his own man, a man that loves being and making his music outdoors.

Loeks has decided to rerelease In This Place, and it certainly deserves more attention than it got the first time around.

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