If you’ve got the pipes Leo Sawikin does, creating an underwhelming harmony just isn’t a possibility, especially when it comes to songs like Row Me Away’s “Tell Me There’s An Answer.” In tracks like this one, the title cut, and “A Whole World Waiting,” Sawikin’s Row Me Away presents us with a weaponized lead vocal from the noted Chordaes singer that is hardly underutilized across the whole LP. If anything, I think this album gives him an incredible opportunity to exploit his greatest gift more than he has previously, which is no small statement to make if you know this guy’s discography.
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The melodicism in Row Me Away comes to us at a couple of different speeds, but regardless of how hard or soft Sawikin’s hooks wind up being, it’s his very presence that provides us with a rare continuity I’m having a harder and harder time finding left of the dial this autumn. “Golden Days (Far Out At Sea)” and “Born Too Late” are stylistic cousins if anything at all, but they don’t feel aesthetically polarizing mostly because of the way this singer draws together their most climactic moments with his seamless vocal delivery.
These lyrics are definitely more honest than I was initially expecting, which isn’t to say that I think Leo Sawikin has ever held anything back from his audience before so much as it’s acknowledging how much further he’s pushing himself in this instance. Row Me Away’s title track feels like a diary entry stained with emotion that doesn’t normally make it onto a pop LP, and it spills into the narratives of “If I Stayed” and “Wasting My Whole Life” as though we’re listening to a concept album rather than a rather eclectic, sonically experimental alternative rock LP.
Sawikin’s humble tone as a singer is one of the greatest attributes songs like “All Just a Drop,” “You Love Too Much,” and “Tell Me There’s An Answer” have going for them, but he’s careful to avoid eclipsing the chill factor coming off of the instrumentation at the same time. He’s using rhythm to move things forward in every part of this tracklist, even when it means the absence of a logical beat (as is the case in “Golden Days (Far Out At Sea)”), which is a lot more than can be said for some of his contemporaries, the more lauded of whom have drifted away from experimentalism in the last couple of years. ‘
I knew I was going to be pleased with what this singer and songwriter had stacked up for his new solo LP, but I can’t say that I predicted Leo Sawikin shining quite as much from the conceptual angle as he does in Row Me Away. He’s got a treasure chest of ideas that are simmering to the surface beautifully in this record, and if there’s anything we can take away from these tracks, it’s that he isn’t about to turn down his ambitious side simply in the name of marching to a commercial beat.
Chadwick Easton