Colin Clyne: The Never Ending Pageant
By Ted Rogen, December 2014

http://www.theequalground.com/indie-music-album-reviews/colin-clyne-the-never-ending-pageant

Colin Clyne has too many achievements to mention but my personal favorite is that he opened for Red Hot Chilli Pipers. Besides winning multiple songwriting awards, getting sponsored, working with Grammy award winning engineers and getting constant airplay the guy just came out with a fine album entitled The Never Ending Pageant.

Right off the bat I would say this is one of the best-engineered albums I have had the opportunity to review. You can’t get this sound with a Presonus Preamp, a hundred dollar interface and computer. The material here is radio ready and indeed does deserves to be getting played on the radio.

The music is acoustic based folk that synergizes with rock and country. On paper it doesn’t sound that exciting but once it hits your ears I’m sure you will have a change of heart. The music’s strongest appeal is the infectious energy that comes out from the speakers. I would argue that if you play this in a room full of people and you notice they don’t have a bit more pep in their step then you should immediately not talk to those people because they may be lacking a soul.

The highlights of the album for me were the ones that popped with optimism and joy. Possibly the best song of the album goes to the first one entitled “Merry Go Round”. Clyne proves he is a good, possibly great, vocalist who has a voice that soars across the music. “This Blue Town” and “Sizzle Not the Steak” were formidable songs but not quite as festive as “I’d Rather Do.” “I’d Rather Do” is a country-based song but Clyne sounds at home here. The guitar work is good but the song is held down by a walking bass line that creates a momentum.

Even Clyne knows you can’t celebrate on every song and shows us on “Top of the Mountain” that his vocals sound good coated with a bit of melancholy. Orchestral strings, guitar and drums create music for him to sing on here. As the album progresses there are a couple of more highlights including “Toast the Happy Times” and “Playing God.”

I will say that you have to be one cynical guy or gal to not enjoy at least a portion of this album. At eleven songs deep the album has a nice ebb and flow and takes little effort to enjoy. Highly Recommended.

Colin Clyne: The Never Ending Pageant
By Neil King, January 2015

http://www.fatea-records.co.uk/magazine/2015/ColinClyne.html
Time is a strange beast at the best of times events that you thought were a short while ago turn out to be a few years back and conversely events that you thought were in the dim and distant turn out to be more recent than you think. I was just about to pen a piece about, “The Never Ending Pageant” following on the heels of debut album, “Doricana” when I realise that it’s been over four years since his last full album. As with the debut album, “The Never Ending Pageant” was preceded by an EP “Doon Tae The Wid”, just to ensure there remained a public face for the singer songwriter.

Both the title of the EP and his singing voice give no doubt to Colin’s Scottish heritage and he’s actually based there again, having spent more than a decade living in the US, with both regions having an impact on both his writing and singing style, but rather than ending up with a sound that is mid-Atlantic, “The Never Ending Pageant” would better be described as Americana with a Scots accent.

First and foremost, this is a songwriters album, and by that I mean it’s a series of tales and stories, rather than a homage to feelings and emotions, though naturally there is an emotive constituency, you wouldn’t be able to add the blues touches and mean them without it. Similarly it’s hard to get riled enough to write about something like injustice without anger and indignation.

One of the things I like about Clyne’s writing style is that whilst it has relatively clean lines, it doesn’t lack depth and gives plenty of opportunity to explore the songs and you get the feeling that if you heard them live, a different inclination here or there could take you easily down another path.

It’s a similar case with the presentation/arrangements, whilst there are other musicians involved in delivering the music, you can also imagine them stripped back to just one man and his guitar, no backing singing, no matter how good or subtle they are, no percussion or bass, just man, word and guitar.

I like “The Never Ending Pageant” a lot. It’s one of those albums that may not set the world on fire at first listening, but which pulls you back to it and will continue to deliver over the years, rather than amaze and disappear in a flash and that’ll do me.