GHOSTLY BEARD – Inward

Inward, the new album by Canadian artist Ghostly Beard, is a straight forward, ten track collection of Classic Rock leaning Pop Rock, with a Jazz flavor and an extra helping of artistry. Blending the influences of classic acts like Eric Clapton, Peter Gabriel, and Steely Dan, Inward could best be described as “Easy Listening Rock”. Overall, the album is well produced and has a nice, modern, warm crispness to it that makes it additionally easier on the ears than just the accessible songwriting alone does. Tracks like “Going Away” and “9 To 5 (Barely Alive)” (which has some nice Beatles vibes), represent the album well and invite the listener to invest themselves deeply into the songs, and hopefully put aside the distractions of the day in the process.

With the exception of some guest vocalists, Ghostly Beard’s Inward is largely a solo project from multi-instrumentalist Patrick Talbot. While that does let Talbot achieve a nice cohesiveness to this release, the one-man-band approach combined with an artsy stance in favor of visual “mystery” makes live outings for this act difficult. His very modern, borderline social justice motivated refusal to accept mainstream entertainment methods, combined with the dismal status of the recorded music industry, almost guarantees that Inward will find limited, at best, financial success, but that doesn’t seem to be the point with a message based release like this. At the end of the day, there are some great, well performed songs here, and quality is a characteristic that almost every listener can enjoy.