Sam Green and the Time Machine – Which Way Left?
Which Way Left? is a fourteen song release from Sam Green and the Time Machine, a marvelous musical experience hailing from Australia that is certain to entertain and connect with a wide audience.
Fourteen songs might seem like an unnecessarily sprawling affair, but these are compositions that never tax listener’s patience and, instead, are honed to a sharp edge and never risk self-indulgence. They are often charged with elements of personal experience and, after even a single pass, anyone engaged with this music is certain to realize these are songs ripped from Green’s personal experiences and vividly alive with the flesh and blood of passions that make for the best music. Sam Green and the Time Machine are unapologetically themselves and they make music that brims over with playfulness and personality in equal measure.
Dandeong Ranges is one of the album’s best songs. Green and the Time Machine pursue musical performances aimed at getting the most out of as little instrumentation as possible. The primary instruments defining the album are guitar, violin, and mandolin and it is a testament to the creativity of the performers and the songwriting quality that songs like this get over so well despite the dearth of sonic variety. Green delivers the song’s fine lyric in such a dramatic, yet never hackneyed, fashion we are immediately drawn into a foreign landscape made familiar by his interpretive powers.
Eli is about a relationship broken by lies and, despite the common path of the subject matter, Green serves up his heartache with such visceral pain listeners will never feel like this is some rote rehash of standard subject matter. He transforms it.
Google Me shows a songwriter who can pull language from the modern landscape and use it to pour old wine into new bottles. The slightly playful edge implied by the title is a doorway leading listeners into another tale of a man dealing with the vagaries of love. The same sparse musical textures heard on other songs strike an interesting contrast with the modern reference and it adds up to one of the album’s best moments.
Harry Ginagain is a cleverly written lyric with equally memorable music backing Green the whole way. One might not expect his voice to be capable of such things, but Green bobs and weaves his way through some ear-catching phrasing that makes this one of the album’s best moments.
He keeps the momentum going with the next song Howdido and great verses culminate in a memorable chorus that exercises the same artful restrain heard elsewhere on the release.
The violin and melodic qualities of the song Love for a Moment come at a great place relatively late in the album and possess an uplifting air a little different from the album’s other entries.
The album’s penultimate track Popcorn is one of the more remarkable pieces of songwriting on this release thanks to his powerful invocation of how we keep coming back to painful scenes in both life and entertainment to elucidate our own experiences. It’s a stirring exclamation point on an album that quietly achieves monumental ends.
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