There are two ways to listen to Alec Gross’ latest take on Americana. On first listen, Strip The Lanterns: The Night Terrors of Mr. Ron Avery might be torch music best experienced with your lover close by. On closer inspection, one finds a meticulously detailed concept on par with Dylan’s "Bringing It All Back Home". Listening to the record this way, Gross re-conceptualizes a lost America told through the eyes of its dark protagonist, Ron Avery. Like a lot of folk singer-songwriters, Alec paints a specific time and place for the experiences that his character makes his way through. Most of these aren’t happy times, and this comes through loud and clear on songs like the haunting ‘Burning Grounds,’ inspired by Alec’s trip to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and a poem he saw there by Anatoly Kuznetsov. Most tracks are quiet and moody impressions of an imagined idyllic existence, from the Irish ballad ‘Be Not Jealous of the Sea,’ to the tormented ‘Looking Glass Lies.’ It isn’t until barnburner ‘Strip the Lanterns’ that we hear Gross really cut loose, but it’s well worth the wait through the record’s more even-tempered and traditional sections. With such a buttery voice, one might wonder why he felt the need to go through all this trouble to showcase his enormous talents in the first place. ‘If You Don’t Mind (Baby Go Ahead)’ could be wedding song of the year, and there’s plenty more on this record to make you think of Alec simply as a romantic, like Don Williams with a high tenor. But it’s stuff like this that reminds me of how different an artist’s vision for their music can be to your own, and makes the trip of discovering Alec’s voice all the more fun. – Mike Levine (@goldnuggets)
