Great alternative music, smooth vocals building up to energetic rhythms. "Everywhere I Go" is a lovely track especially, with the simple melodic piano notes and a sweet soft voice. Various interesting fragmented touches with the beats just beautifully highlight the piece. "I'll Hold You In My Arms" is a truly beautiful piece also.
Since graduating from the University of Miami in 2004, New Jersey native Adam Gilbert has been active as a piano-based singer-songwriter, producer, and music director. With fans representing over 100 different countires on his e-mail list, Adam's piano-driven alternative pop/rock is reaching and inspiring people from all over the world. His last album, Fishing For Water, received national airplay and five-star reviews on iTunes. His music video for “Break Through Today” (Fishing For Water) was nationally televised in 2009 under FUSE. One review called the song “a modern masterpiece of songwriting with an innovative sense of musical adventure.” Although the video for "Break Through Today’" is priceless YouTube entertainment, Gilbert has a more serious, purpose-driven side to his music, which is dynamically expressed via his latest release A Generation of Forgotten Kings.
"Nervy in its ambitions, thrilling in its sense of influence-smashing alchemy, and memorable for its raw emotional honesty, Adam Gilbert’s A Generation of Forgotten Kings is an exciting find."
The title track opens the album on an billowing, very Coldplay-ish note, as Gilbert makes a stirring call for generational unity toward change. As he suggests, “Let’s see what we can do!,” the song surges forward with arena-shaking intensity.
Of course, there’s nowhere to go but down from there, and Gilbert handles the transition into piano-driven emotional complexity on “How Do We Respond” with delicate finesse, adroitly laying out the doubt and confusion on the other side of the same question. From there, Gilbert moves deeper into a sense of elegiac reverie with “On a Hill” and “Steady as We Go,” recalling the most resonant of Elton John’s work without directly referencing it.
At his best, Gilbert mixes and matches familiar sensibilities like that, creating something that’s uniquely his own: “This Old World” and “Better,” for instance, share the satiny-smooth approachableness of AM singer-songwriters like Neil Sedaka—even if the subject matter is dark and more modern. Similarly, “Do You Want Me Now?” has the brawny operatic sweep of the best Queen, with a touch of Radiohead’s naked openness. I hear Coldplay again in the rhythmically complex “I’ll Hold You in My Arms,” but without even a whisper of irony in the lovestruck lyric.
“A Little Emotion” and “We're Accountable” combine the anthematic power of “A Generation of Forgotten Kings” and the turbulent feelings of “On a Hill,” while “Everywhere I Go” explores a torchy, closing-hour vulnerability.
Gilbert’s record finds its power in those depths of emotion from the loudest crashes to the confidential, almost whispered pleas of “Stay Awhile.” When he powers up again for a rousing finale in “Listen,” completing the circle both thematically and musically for A Generation of Forgotten Kings, there is both a sense of closure, of a completed thought—and also that Gilbert has so very much more to say.
Think positive. Be happy. x