Tommy Collison

Here’s a new music recommendation for you. Pascal was in RENT and Civilian is his 3rd studio album, released in 2004. It appeals to all my musical senses because it has killer drums, smooth piano and powerful vocals. I think we all know though that only the first feature in that list is a necessity for an album to appeal to me :-)

Like most albums, there are songs I could take and some I could leave, but the proportion of good songs against bad ones is delightfully high.

I’ve showcased Beautiful Song before, and even though it’s slid in my rankings to #2 in the list of best songs. It’s still great though. It begins with a simple piano, accompanied by a didgeridoo, before the drums come crashing in as if to teach the unwary listener that falling asleep isn’t allowed.

The best song on the album, the ‘one to download’, if I encouraged such actions (which I don’t), is Book of Endings. It is one of the few songs that, when I’m downstairs doing something and it comes on iTunes, will make me get up and go upstairs to the drums and play it. The drum beat is one which I class to be very ‘drummable’, which is great. There is honestly nothing worse than a song with a great beat but one which I’m not able to drum along to. There’s this great sense of ‘gah! stop tormenting me!’.

Actually, Pascal’s album is great like that. I can drum along (and pretty close to the original studio drummer’s stylings) to every song, bar one.. but we don’t talk about that one :)