If the Sun Dies by Philadelphia, USA’s folk stalwart Greg Weeks is an incredibly warm, gentle album punctuated by moments of noise and harshness.

By Stanley West

This is most obvious in songs like Dream You Awake, which opens with beautifully softly picked acoustic guitar and later devolves into heavily distorted noise, but this contrast is present on almost all the songs on the album. The title and opening track also begins with soft acoustic guitar and has an overdriven solo towards the middle. This is also true of the second and third tracks, which eventually makes the guitar solos seem a little repetitive.

By the fourth song – Their Taillights Burn the Hillside Red – though, we are given a much more consistently soft song with a much more meandering feel and by the fifth the guitar is so distorted it no longer feels like a traditional solo. The album is not in danger of being overly repetitive.

It has to be said that the guitar playing on this album is nothing short of brilliant. Some particularly gorgeous moments include the picking on the song Dream You Awake. This song also probably has the best vocals of the album. The higher pitch at the end of each verse adds a surprising vulnerability to the song. This is paradoxically the heaviest song on the album too, with a hugely distorted instrumental in the middle of the song.

Ridley Street is another of the album’s best songs. It opens with an incredibly simple strummed pattern on guitar which evolves into something more complicated before drums and bass guitar kick in. After this, the guitar pattern is pretty similar for the rest of the song, except for a key change and a brilliant, distorted riff played over it. The song ends incredibly abruptly, which is surprising given the general softness of it.

The album also deserves credit for its lyrics, which are just as consistently good as the guitar playing. Lots of the songs include reference to driving alone (which I suppose makes sense from an American). This is often used to relate to a more general solitude and loneliness. For example, on Ridley Street he sings “the headlights flash on me/ they don’t see me” and on A Narrow Star “the car [is] a flaming wreck” which is “a perfect way to die.” Death is also a common theme. For example: “there’s a million ways to die/ a thousand questions as to why.”

To summarise, If the Sun Dies is a consistently great album both lyrically and musically. I’d recommend it to any fan of folk music.