A Glimpse of the Celestial
cactus and talitha | barbaricyawp76@hotmail.com | 11/24/1999
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Robert Becker's CD release, To A Friend Unknown, is as expansive as the western skyline, managing at once to be intensely personal in its probing of interior horizons, yet remaining solidly universal in its appeal. Becker's songs are well-wrought urns, polished with craftsmanship, each growing from modest beginnings into spacious and organic odysseys. His lyrics tend toward a bareness and one gets the feeling that Becker has weighed each word carefully, trimming any unnecessary words, and stringing them together in richly imagistic utterances that are supremely understated. His compositions are sophisticated in their complexity--deceivingly straight-faced on the surface, yet irony lurks in the depths: "What was the flavor of all that hurry?" Becker's CD seems to work between the terrestrial hardships of life and the celestial impulses of our aspirations. Like the tree sketched on the CD's back cover, we are able to grow toward the light, to seemingly unreachable heights. Becker opens a musical space in which we may experience a robust air and witness fresh horizons as his lyrics push at the drooping ceiling of containing thoughts, and simultaneously clear the freeways where we can meet new friends on similar journeys. To A Friend Unknown is a vastly compassionate voice which raises the most overlooked of questions to places of critical importance. Becker's music invests in the common person, evoking in his listener a celebration of even the most common of everyday sights. His tender simplicity has the capacity to paradoxically forge a strong sense of individuality as well as community. Becker's compassionate concern is a lantern in the night, a train whistle giving rise to hope, "Like a freight train whistle in the dead of night, I can hear him out there but he's nowhere in sight." Fortunately for lovers of good music, Becker has been sighted, and the record of this sighting is burned onto the intensly affective tracks of To a Friend Unknown -- a CD must for those who would glimpse the world through a poet's eye."
Track Listings (12) - Disc #1