Andy Shauf
Wilds

This year, almost quietly, the latest effort by Andy Shauf, a young Canadian singer-songwriter on the rise with already five albums under his belt, has been released. "Wilds" arrives just a year after the decent and perhaps at times somewhat dull "The Neon Skyline", of which this EP immediately appears as the natural continuation, given that several tracks present here were discarded from the latter.

The songwriting is indeed typical of Shauf, with his characters and his Kent Haruf novel-like settings, and his surreal situations that at times are not that surreal. Situations that are told more incisively compared to the previous album, which also contained some flashes of genius ("Living Room" above all), perhaps also rewarded by a process of subtraction operated on a part of the instrumental section this time extremely dry and essential. In its brevity (just 26 minutes of music), “Wilds” is a work of great freshness that marks Shauf's return to an instinctive compositional approach, which in his recent works had somewhat given way to a formal precision unable to bring out the immediacy and evocative impact of his writing style.

In essence, with this work, Shauf reminds us (perhaps more himself than us) that he knows how to write beautiful stories, knows how to tell them excellently, and also knows how to play them, and the reality of the facts demonstrates that this is enough to produce a good record. It remains to be seen whether in a few years we will look at these songs as the compendium of his old poetics and a leap towards other shores, or merely the confirmation of an undeniable talent destined to tell beautiful stories from the comfortable berth of a safe harbor.