Canadian singer-songwriter David James Allen has been around for a while and currently has three albums under his belt – When The Demons Come Home (2017), Radiations (2020), and his latest, The Architect, which saw its release date late in 2021.
While Radiations followed what can be called ‘the pandemic’ pattern, with each track released monthly, The Architect seems to have been done with a uniform idea in mind, resulting eventually in a more uniform sound that Allen seems to have gone for. Yet, the question is: “Does it lift itself from what can be called ‘the usual singer-songwriter output’?”
For that to happen, the key usually lies in the fact whether the artists made their music as a self-serving exercise or something that was actually geared towards a listening audience to enjoy and appreciate.
As Allen puts it himself, “when I write a song, I want it to work on different levels for different people and I try to get to the core of emotion that a lot of people have experienced, so they feel less alone. I want to make somebody feel like they are connected and not isolated. My door is open.”
And he does exactly that on The Architect. As the album title suggests, Allen builds a set of well-crafted roots-oriented songs, that have both a head and a tail, essential knowledge and craft of the genre they are set in, and above all, an emotional engagement that go beyond an exercise in genre.
When you have such an approach, you are bound to come up with something good and something that the audience will appreciate and embrace its own. On The Architect David James Allen does exactly that.
