OLD SOULS

Rick Miller's work is a great continuum, which could appear melodically very accessible (and many of us will not reproach him for it!), but which deserves however much more than a distracted ear, to seize all the inflections and the subtleties.

'Old Souls' opens the ball with "Time's Way", the epic of the album, in which Rick deploys all his know-how. Against a background of rather gloomy lyrics, evoking a form of obsession with reincarnation, the song travels along a path that is by turns mysterious, tormented, obvious, and reassuring. Few composers are able to bring all this together in one piece! And yet, it all flows. "Guinevere" is a model of amorous decay, for which Rick minimizes the instrumentation to emphasize the sense of melody. "Haunt me" on the contrary embarks its share of electric guitar phrasing, in counterpoint of the atmosphere of spiritual relaxation that it distils. "Virgin Rebirth" follows in the footsteps of "The Dark Lady" ('Heart of Darkness'), with its keyboard acceleration; it takes again the spirit and the approach, while proving however much shorter! A nice spin, especially since its title could be a wink to the one of its elder... "The Red Sky" is classically 'Millerian', with a long flute introduction, which leads to an eminently melancholic and mysterious development. "Ixtlan awaits" is even more connected to its musical anteriority than "Virgin Rebirth", because it seems impossible to listen to it without hearing again the female vocals of "Call" ('Dreamtigers') ! And I would dare to say that the semantic proximity is almost blatant, because the titles of these 2 tracks could be connected: "Ixtlan awaits"... for a "Call". "A stitch in time" provides the same nervous tension as "The Land and the Sea" ('Belief in the Machine'), but with a more oriental approach. "Lost Karma" is another demonstration of esoteric or medieval poetry (with its flute and harpsichord-like guitar), and "Don Quixote" almost closes the album, giving it its second moment of bravery. An instrumental break logically Hispanic, and a development less varied than that of "Time's Way", but in which the electric guitar expresses all its bite.

Rick's music uses an incredibly rich methodology to achieve, almost every time, the same result. It is very difficult to recommend one album of Rick Miller, rather than another, to synthesize his entire work. Most of his records could completely fulfill this mission! And yet, you will miss something if you don't have the opportunity to take the bridges that link the intentions and the dreams of the composer, from one album to the other. This music is a spiritual work, vast... and complex!