Album Details

• Artist: Sophist
• EP:
The White Ep
• Label: indie
• Year of Release: 2012
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: mark_morton on 2012-06-15

Is there anything more emotionally stirring than a musician alone with his guitar and a story to tell? Between his range in vocal expression, his love/hate relationship with his guitar (a bi-polar exercise from delicate strumming to full-on string bashing), Sophist (AKA Tim Palmer) creates, no, sculpts a new form of folk art music.

Engaging in a physical musical experience is highly unusual for folk rock, which is typified by passive execution. Sophist is more Neil Young than Paul Simon, more expressionist than romanticist.

In a mere three songs, he leaves you breathless, emotionally drained, and physically exhausted, as though, for those 12-minutes, you were a part of his world, sharing his experiences and being beaten about by his aggressive form of folk poetry.

It is the kind of performance that may actually scare people in coffee houses, but it would definitely command one's attention. And that is a trait that has been sorely lacking in the folk music scene for several decades. The genre is primarily marked by subdued, introspective, and physically weak musical conveyance.

Being able to feel a musician's performance is also a very rare commodity in this age of cold, heartless studio wizardry. So, I tip my proverbial hat to The Sophist for taking folk rock to Gold's Gym, pumping it up, and unleashing it to the unsuspecting " "girly" masses.

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