By Zac Taylor
Managing Editor
Last month at the Lily Pad, recent Berklee alumnus Nathan Reich released his first full-length LP entitled Arms Around a Ghost. The initial undeniable impression: this is some serious songwriting. While some tunes are sung over solo acoustic guitar, others feature Alexandra Spalding’s graceful cello and vocal harmonies, and a handful have rolling tom drums, electric guitar murmurs, and textures you can’t quite place your finger one—this record is leaps and bounds more mature and complete sounding than his previous EP Paper Planes. Produced by Adrian Olsen, this record’s secret weapon is indeed in its simplicity.
“From a seed into a shrub, then a weed that grew too much, and now I’m so tall, how will I ever fit inside?” he sings in the second track, introducing a theme about growing up and finding his place in the world that laces throughout the narrative of the whole record. A chilling tune about sleeping in a parking lot with “a fortress of shopping carts, and a trash bag bed” is as haunting as anything from Sufjan Steven’s darker side.
The single, and by far the most accessible tune, “Somewhere in Colorado” has still been stuck in every Bostonian’s head since he performed it as a trio with Spalding and the fascinating Thomas Bohlen on pedal steel at a sold out Berklee Performance Center this past February. The charming yet biting song “Joelle,” is a dismissal to an old lover who has “lost her common sense…climbing the neighbor’s fence.” The harmonic arrangements and aggressive fingerstyle guitar playing, while impressive and at times quite advanced, serve the songs for the sake of serving the songs, which is an admirable trait not often found in musicians of the same caliber.
Reich’s vocals have a melancholy restraint that echoes Elliott Smith and even Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. The lyricism follows suit: literary but straightforward, playful but honest. Themes of alcoholism, loneliness, and the daunting ambition of exploring the world, without and within, pump the majority of the blood through Arms Around a Ghost.
