Chris Staples – Cloud Souvenirs
Chris Staples – Cloud Souvenirs
Format: Vinyl LP – Digital
Label: Hot Tub Recordings
Release: 2023
Release date: May 26, 2023
‘Cloud Souvenirs’ is the sixth full length album by American songwriter Chris Staples. The ten songs spun from accumulated memory and flashes of insight into the hidden corners of life
Recorded in the midst of travel back and forth to Florida to deal with his mother’s declining health, Staples built an unselfconscious masterpiece, a cathartic and complete expression of his craft. Cloud Souvenirs is a parade of sculpted moments, some light and airy, some gray and heavy with rain– variations on beauty, tenderness, grief and unexpected joy.
Chris Staples shared the second single titled Nasty Habit
What is gone is all still here. Florida is a place steeped in memories and significance for Staples, landscape, humidity, shapes in the sky, intangible tokens of youth. He worked on the album intermittently during these visits, but had to cancel recording sessions to take his mother to the hospital. Her ever present piano playing around the house was a key to finding music. Her loss is a reality impossible to express.
Cloud Souvenirs is laced with insistent phrases and melody lines that linger long after listening. Songs that hint at narrative without being weighed down by unnecessary detail. Evocative and economical, melancholic and magical. Songs that nourish life and encourage self-reflection. Pulsing electronica, acoustic strummers, synth stabs, dry snare drums setting the pace, clear melodies fill the sky, no rain for days.
Staples is more pop artist than an indie singer, a poet and craftsman working in an independent tradition and at a human scale. A twelve-string guitar or warbling effect pedal, a buoyant brass arrangement, a passage of vocal harmony–this pleasing sonic tapestry is anchored by his warm voice and naturalistic lyricism. Staples enlisted a hometown friend, producer Jeremy SH Griffith, to bring a fresh perspective to ten years of self-recording, their easy collaboration shines on each crisp and devastating track.
Website: https://www.chrisstaplesmusic.com/
Tracks:
01. Bulldozer Mouth
02. Burnout Together
03. Do Whatever I Want
04. Dreams Come True
05. I Want To Get Lost
06. Looking Into Me
07. Nasty Habit
08. Souvenir
09. Sunny Afternoon
10. Take Your Time