"By Your Side" by Reiss Pinder
Review
It's been a while since I wrote about a Reiss Pinder solo release: it's been four years since "California" (you can find it on ‘Hot Music Live Presents Volume Seven' too) but in that time he's been written about plenty of times in the context of several bands, most notably & most recently the mighty HEK.
However he's found time to treat us to "By Your Side" which comes out on January 30th via our local Love + Madness label, run by Pandora Craig & Sam McNulty and which has also put out tracks by artists including Jack Blackman and Dean MacDonald whom we cover regularly.
Awesome as the sound of HEK in full flight is, inevitably with a writer with Reiss' range, there will be songs he rightly feels require a different, more intimate setting to convey their essence. This then is one such.
You'd find it hard to name a band tighter than HEK and this helps magnify their power & increase their impact. Some songs however cry out for looser treatment which is what is gloriously applied with "By Your Side". Reiss seems to revel in being allowed to roam freely, leashless. That he spoke of his love (among other artists) of Bob Dylan in an interview on HillzFM this morning is interesting makes sense in this context. So many of his classics, though the lyrics were carefully pre-thought out, sound like the arrangement was arrived at via a process of jamming: in fact the re-releases in the "Bootleg" series show this to be the case. Here, it was illuminating to hear Reiss speak of the song emanating from an interesting opening chord: presumably he just went from there & it works.
He also puts his lyric writing down to something nearer perhaps to intuition than cold calculation (I think he's being too modest though in calling it "more or less a ramble"). I'm sure careless & random spouting of words produces some terrible songs but in the head of a writer as good as Reiss, letting instinct have its head can produce something closer to poetry than prose.
What of course shines through is his honesty & authenticity: he might not fully understand what he's created (and that's actually a good thing for an artist I think) nor how he got there, but what he sings, he truly believes in and is committed to. The passion is palpable. He is certainly amongst the best songwriters creating locally and maybe having this song out under his own name will help to shine a light more clearly on this & get him his due.
As you all know, I am an admirer of HEK and have high hopes for them: working on achieving their deserved success will take much of his time & what amount that leaves for his solo work is unclear, but I hope he can manage both releases & gigs in both formats as I think each deserves its complementary public attention.
