REVIEW: Trevor Drury — Alice (SINGLE)

The American underground has always been one of the cutthroat indie music circuits on the planet, but the last ten years — and the advent of technology that has come with it — have certainly upped the stakes for rising names more than any of us could have anticipated ahead of time. Trevor Drury has been in the trenches for a while now, and though his music has attracted a lot of fanfare from the indie press, critics, and curious fans interested in something a little fresher than the mainstream can offer, he hasn’t sold out any of his creative identity just to sell more records to a larger market. His is a dedicated musical mission, and in his new single “Alice,” his relationship with the medium feels all the more renewed.

TREVOR DRUERY URL: https://www.officialtrevordrury.com/about

These harmonies are the undisputed bedrock of the song, but they’re considerably more rigid than those we heard in the last couple of tracks Drury has released. He seems more interested in the shape of the melody than he is in the textural/tonal detail it can produce in a given moment, which isn’t to say that he’s rushing past the subtler details in this performance at all. On the contrary, they’re simply not the focus he’s trying to draw out of the audience in “Alice;” the directness of his attack is the real bread and butter of the show here, which is telling of a desire to break away from the standards his peers hold as a means of better establishing who he really is as an artist.

Drury never sounds uncomfortable with the grooves in “Alice,” no matter how blunt they become, and while I don’t think that he needed to press himself into the hook with quite as much force as he does in the chorus, I can understand what his motivation for doing so might have been inside of the studio. Too many pop singers are criticized for their lack of physicality, especially in modern tracks that push a lot of weight on the audience via the bass component of a mix, but this isn’t going to a problem with this single at all. He doesn’t let us interpret any part of this composition as being part of a recycled model, which is more than can be said for a lot of young players in the business of making pop music these days.

APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/us/album/alice/1564799174?i=1564799190

I love what Trevor Drury has been concocting inside the studio over the past five years, and “Alice” reminds us all that his direction is admittedly as unpredictable to followers as it is exciting to anyone who loves melodic wonderment at its most powerful and unfiltered. The only complaint I have with his discography is that it isn’t fuller than it presently is, but with the release of content as stirring as this song is, I doubt the demand for more won’t have some effect on getting him back into the groove of recording on a full-time basis quite soon. I’ll be waiting for more, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

Colin Jordan