PETER SENIOR RELEASES ‘COOL RIDE’
‘What are ya tryin to hide?’
Peter Senior asks as the seductive pulse of his laid-back, last bar room band standing rolls along behind him, letting the strains of the intermittent brass and an urbane blues choir seep out from your speakers and straight down to your feet.
But this abbreviated tale of desire and allure resists the easy temptation to take itself too seriously, quickly assuming the guise of a late-era Billy Joel track, transformed into a contemporary piano-based tune by all the nuances of the production.
Not an easy thing to pull off. But this track does it. After repeated listens, it becomes clear that it’s not only Peter’s resolute and intrepid vocal style that does it, initially staying in a low register until it ascends into Springsteen-like territory but the juxtaposition of sparse instrumentation and those recurring jolts of full swathes of sound and crooning. And, of course, the space that enshrouds the track. In fact, during this trip of a song, the presence of space is all important. Sometimes what’s being played is more crucial than what is, and this concept is harnessed to great effect here.
This allows the vocal delivery, the pun-infused lines, and the ever obedient band to find a place within the general gist of the song’s sentiment, which could be misconstrued were it not for all these subtle attributes. In this politically correct age, even tried and true styles like the kind this song represents have to develop, have to bow down to the expectations of time.
And this three-minute cruisy salute to yearning and ardour does that. ‘You’re a machine I don’t mean to be mean,’ is sung near the second half of the song but this effortlessly rendered escape clause can just as easily have been the song’s motto.
Its apologetic approach is echoed by the drum-anchored attack but becomes more like a plea. One can imagine this gem of a throwback song making late-night radio playlists all over the place, and its broadcast becoming a self-referential good time loop, as it’s blasted out of a car speaker, under lonesome street lights, vocals skirting around the issue of attraction but making its musical point nonetheless.
LISTEN TO COOL RIDE HERE:
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