Del Suelo – The Musician’s Compass: A 12 Step Programme
With a touch of humor, irony and a lot of contemplation, Del Suelo illustrates a modern beat poet’s soundtrack in the stunning new album The Musician’s Compass: A 12 Step Programme. Music consumers of the 2010s are a complicated and demanding group to satisfy, and in the last few years we’ve seen a dramatic rise in atmospheric influences in every subgenre of contemporary pop, from hip-hop all the way to garage rock.
Audiences want cerebral music that makes them think about the world from different perspectives than their own. We’re a generation of questioners; the status quo of our ancestors makes no sense to us, and it takes a lot more than a simple hook in a pop song to get us captivated by an artist’s sound.
In that spirit, Del Suelo didn’t just craft an awesome new rock album in The Musician’s Compass: A 12 Step Programme, he created a picture window into his inner though process and darkest secrets. It’s a heady listen to digest, but for those with a taste for the sonically elaborate, it’s just what the doctor ordered.
Unlike a lot of similarly conceived concept albums, The Musician’s Compass: A 12 Step Programme never devolves into self-indulgent themes that would only make sense to its composer. Instead, the story of our protagonist is designed around the antithesis of lust, and though there are moments in the album that get slightly off track from the main plot, the audience is never too far from Del Suelo’s reach.
We stay right by his side through all of the trials and tribulations that he throws in our direction, and like a merciful god he rewards us at the end of the album with a culminating anthem in Walk the Plank (a figurative but remarkably fitting title, I might add). I haven’t read Del Suelo’s novel version of The Musician’s Compass: A 12 Step Programme, but after becoming addicted to this album’s affectionate sense of harmony amidst chaos, I feel strongly compelled to see if the book lives up to the music that it inspired.
Devon, the would-be protagonist of The Musician’s Compass: A 12 Step Programme, isn’t all that different from most of us who grow up valuing music as much as we do Sunday dinner, and in his discord-filled life we’re able to get a firsthand look at the struggle it takes to keep this entity that we all love so much present in the lives of a new generation.
We ask a lot of our musicians. We ask them to give us something to make us feel better when nothing will cure our depression. We ask that they serve as good role models for our children and educate them about what it means to feel something beyond what words are capable of expressing.
Music is, for anyone with any sort of depth in their soul, the most treasured art form that we have to share, and for those responsible for channeling it from whatever divine place it must come from, the pressures can become all-consuming. This is the story of The Musician’s Compass: A 12 Step Programme, but it’s also the story of the musicians themselves.
To find out more about Del Suelo, check out their official website by clicking here. Give them a like on Facebook by clicking here & a follow on Twitter by clicking here.
