Eve Adams - Metal Bird (2022)

Life doesn’t often hand out second chances, but when it does, you’d best grab them as Eve Adams does on Metal Bird. Initially released about a year ago, the album sank without a trace. Yet, one person at Basin Rock who heard the album immediately knew that Metal Bird needed just a bit of help to reach its intended audience. The album, now remastered, is re-released with worldwide distribution.

The sliding notes of bass guitar on “Blues Look the Same” have a slightly haunted feel against the fragile piano and mesmerizing voice of Adams as she begins unwinding a tale hinting at life’s disappointments. When she sings, “Time it comes running at your heels in the dark/ Chasing your memory like a dog with no bark/ Memories of mowing lawns and pink masquerades/ Ruby red slippers and the song that’s the same”, the feeling is slightly unsteady as if you are just coming to realize what you’ve been sold isn’t exactly what you thought you were buying.

“A Walk in the Park” is all vibes, piano and percussion; unfolding over the course of just ten lines, you get all the hints you need that this isn’t a dream you want to be in. “You could pull over the car/ And we could just move on/ We are afraid to admit this road it’s so long.” The failure to admit what is right in front of one’s eyes can’t be overstated.

The slipstreams of “Metal Bird” reveal a world of hurts that haven’t healed. The 747 that brought her back to LA from Vancouver seemed to descend like her life, trying to deal with the remnants she’d left behind. Musically, the album seems to take a similar tone, using several instruments coming together in unexpected ways, creating something quite fragile and hurt, lost in clouds of dreams and visions of realities that never fit the dream.

The otherworldly keyboards of “Prisoner” expose deeper cracks in the framework of relationships. She finds ways to say so much with a minimum of words. “Well, I’m grateful for the dead/ And I’m seeing all these things in my head/ And our ruins made of time/ Build a castle in the sky.” Our illusions and delusions always have a way of building things into something much bigger than we could even imagine.

Despite putting so much baggage on display, “My Only Dream” ends the album on a more positive note. There’s still a sense of melancholy to the music, yet at the same time, the tone is somehow more hopeful as Adams sings, “And it ain’t somethin’ you can take/ And it ain’t built to break, like your machines” you start to realize there may be a way out of this morass.

With Metal Bird, Eve Adams, drawing on personal grief and hope, exposes the flaws that have followed her around. She may not have mastered them all, but she’s on her way, and we can learn from the experience.