EP Review: Kristian Phillip Valentino – The Sun Is Setting

If you are a fan of acoustic singer songwriters who carry emotional weight, this new EP from Kristian Phillip Valentino is going to be a fit. I’ll say from the outset that it’s a collection of songs that feel as much like emotive poetry as they do songs. It’s an EP that features “days to face the demons,” so buckle up and prepare yourself for a journey.

The opening track “Convince You” is loaded with melancholy energy. The song is contemplative and tells a depressive story. The sparing production allows for the sincerity to seep through. It’s a song about leaving a town and needing to forgive everyone for yourself. It’s heavy.

“Still Your Boy” has a bright acoustic style to it. It’s a song to a father complete with the complex emotions wrapped in that relationship. It’s part confession, part apology, and part declaration of how life changes us over time. It sounds like a rocky situation, but this honest reflection and the plaintive, “I’m still your boy” line is quite moving.

The third track “Evil of This Would” puts a bit of a spiritual language to some of the concepts from the first two tracks. It names and declares the influence of evil in the shadows. Regardless of how you feel about the spirituality, there’s a rawness to the composition that puts me in mind of traditional blues artists. There’s an expressiveness on the guitar work that feels unique to this track, too, with patterns that defy genre in some compelling ways. It’s the most distinctly Americana track on the EP.

The final track “Naked” brings in a harmonica for some contradistinction to the lower guitar. The song is fundamentally about how humans enter the world and will die with nothing as well. It’s gritty and vaguely biblical in imagery. The melodic pattern feels almost ancient in its depth, like something that could have come from the Old World. The lyrics are not the typical rhyming, toe tapping styles of so much folk music today. Instead, this is a gritty and raw reflection of hard life.

This is definitely more melancholy than a lot of what we’ve featured here. Fans of the grittier track from Tyler Childers or David Ramirez will find a lot to like here. It’s full of emotion and will certainly speak to folks who have experienced some of the darker roads in this life. May this EP help those folks find their way back to the light.


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