Listening to Charlie Freeman’s music and songs is like an ode to loving life and feeling alive.
He has that ‘just enough-raspy’ voice that would make his voice that rich and balanced.
It feels like he had a lot of musical energy and emotions going through him when he was writing for this album “Love”, it is very evident, you can just feel the energy, thought, time and effort that went into this labor of love.
Charlie’s songs have this nature of having the catchiest of melodic vocal lines that is guaranteed to make you sing along from the first time you hear it around, even if you still don’t know the lyrics, I love when this happens.
Let’s get into the nitty gritty of this album and see what it’s made of…”Love” maybe?
We’re starting out with the first track called “Freedom”…and it takes flight.
The track builds up slowly but surely, and is an excellent introduction to the album.
The acoustic guitars shine in this one, this track is such a people pleaser and I can imagine it as the ending song for Charlie’s concerts with heavy audience participation.
From there, we go into the second track “London Nights” with a more active beat and style.
Even though the music gets to be more active, the vocals go into more mellow territory in the verses and bridge. The melody is catchy and I love how the drum fills! It gets me going into each section. The breakdown in the middle really got me.
The third track “Maybe it’s Me” is such a change of gears with very subtle hints of swing in it.
Love the chord progression for this song specially that tension chord before resolving into the verse, what a detail! It got me the first time I heard it and made me wait for it.
The fourth track-once again-has a catchy melody, and now it seems that Charlie wants something very clear…he wants each track to have its own identity and catchy melodic vocal lines while sharing the same essence across the whole album. If that is what he wants, he already succeeded.
This time around you get the subtle hints of 70s disco music in the sound of the drums and the backing guitars.
“Let There Be Love”, the fifth track in the album is a straight forward pop rock sounding and feeling song, the highlight for me was the vocal work near the end of the song, with that gospel-like choir adding so much color to the song and its meaning.
Getting into this album, I didn’t expect to come across a song like the next one, it is called “Superman” and it is the sixth track of the album. Charlie’s vocals in the intro along with the soft piano playing make an excellent intro to the track, until Charlie’s vocals soar and hit you suddenly with the chorus.
After that we return to some bouncy and energetic beats with “Walk Away” the seventh track.
The lyrics are very real and relatable, I bet this track will touch on something that happened to almost anyone. The guitars, drums, percussion and vocal melodies all blend and work together to give us another pop rock upbeat track….
…and this takes me to something that I needed to talk about…
The ending of the last track goes beautifully into the beginning of the next track. I thought it was actually the same track at first, but when the drum beat started doing some weird timing stuff, I got it then. However, I noticed that this was the first track that didn’t have that super catchy melodic vocal line as the earlier tracks…maybe Charlie raised the bar too much on the earlier tracks? I don’t know, but it did not hook me like the earlier tracks, even though it had the catchiest drum beat of all. Maybe that’s just me.
Back to his catchy melodies (for me at least) we’re back with the ninth track “Hey Sister”.
This track is the kind of pop rock song that you would see in a movie where the characters start jumping and dancing while at home doing normal stuff and just having some fun.
“Sorry” is the tenth track…it is a ballad of emotions, with a very emotive vocal performance from Charlie. Just listen to it, it’s real.
Last but not least, at all, and actually my top favorite track of this album, the last song of the album, “Falling Down”.
Let me tell you why I love this song the most, it ticks all the checkboxes for me.
It has awesome guitar work, awesome vocal lines, a guest singer, cello and a mellow flow to it.
Charlie waves bye with a very emotional ending song that really shines in all of its musical elements and also its placement in the album.
You will find a lot of things to love about Charlie Freeman’s album “Love”, if you like classics like Oasis, The Cardigans and Coldplay’s earlier music, you will love “Love”!
This album gives us Charlie’s point of view about a very tricky formula in music, it has excellent music work, catchy melodies, awesome sound engineering and influences that covers a lot of ground…while maintaining the artist’s original and true essence.
I would suggest this album for music lovers, musicians and even casual music listeners, because this album is not just about awesome chord progressions or amazing sounding vocals and guitars, it is about a human writing a love letter to his emotions…and this is something we can all relate to.
Best of luck to Charlie and can’t wait to see and hear what’s coming next, because he is working on releasing an acoustic album sometime this year. This sounds awesome.
Cheers!
