Artist : Chris Velan Album : Amateur Hour Year : 2018 Genre : Indie Source : CD Label : Self Released Catalog : Rls.Date : 2019-01-31 Bitrate : VBRkbps Size : 70.74MB ----- 1. All Time Record 3:30 2. You Can Talk 4:05 3. Everything I Have Is Stolen 3:15 4. Amateur Hour 3:35 5. Cola Wars 5:27 6. Only One 4:43 7. The Holdout 3:37 8. Danger Dreaming 4:06 9. Night Caller 4:54 10. Black Eye 4:33 ----- 41:45 ----- For what became his latest album, Amateur Hour, Chris Velan began writing songs about a relationship, complete with the emotional fare of desire, love, resentment and pain. But he soon realized that the relationship he was exploring was the one with himself. And he was breaking up. The resulting collection of songs plays out like a series of competing monologues in a one-act play where the characters are locked in a room and forced to respond to unexpected news; that whatever they believed to be true of themselves was not. The album was recorded over a winter week in ChrisÆ country studio with a stalwart Montreal crew: Bucky Wheaton on drums, Mishka Stein on bass, Michael Feuerstack on guitar and pedal steel, Max Henry on keys, Sara Johnston on backing vocals and Tom Mennier on piano. The snowy, pastoral setting did nothing to temper what is at its heart a vital-sounding, pop-rock record of hooky, sometimes firey and bombastic, tracks. Adroitly produced and recorded by Rod Shearer, Amateur Hour achieves a low-humming, thrilling point of humanness that spans bare-bone ballads and cascading free-for-alls. One is left with the distinct sense that this time around, Velan is gleefully participating in his own dismantling, anxious to explode into his own, joyful splinters.