Poet-musician Rick Sparkes and his band, The Enablers, have released their latest album, The Trouble With The Light. The multi-talented ensemble are second-to-none when it comes to maximizing the potential of guitars, and it graciously shows in an album containing previous singles “Nashwaak” and “Prince County Fair.”
There’s the simplistic; tracks like “Love Will Save Us All” and the aforementioned “Prince County Fair” show their strength, respectively, with a calm melody whose heartfelt messages of positivity carry all the energy they need, and by jumping right into an upbeat groove that stays upbeat. Think Tom Petty but if his instruments were imbued with the spirit of Sid Vicious.
There’s the technical, where tracks like “Beseech You” have a much more lo-fi bassline while countless other scratchy strings bounce around the listener’s headphones.
There’s the spotlight in tracks like “Sherri,” where a sizeable solo is given to the twangy guitar at around the 2:30 mark, perhaps to represent how long he’s waiting for Sherri to come back.
There’s sharing the spotlight, like when “Nashwaak”’s weighty strings are matched in class by the spectacularly paced percussion. Then there’s team efforts, like “Yeah Yeah Yeah,” where the groovy guitar rhythm is just another piece of the puzzle alongside the introductory synth pad, preparatory hi-hats, and Sparkes’ whispery vocals to create a track symbolic of both relaxation and grit, true to the Maritime spirit of “get-er-done.”
Finally, “One More Song” brings us on a trip down memory lane (memory lane being the past half an hour or so we’ve been listening to the album). The longest track of the album falls two seconds short of the seven-minute mark, leaving the band with plenty of time to include all the different styles we’ve seen up to this point.
Sparkes explains that while the album itself may not have a cohesive narrative to it, with each song expressing its own story capable of standing on its own, the concept behind the album’s titular-track came from an experience he had as a 10-year old.
“A young mother in my neighbourhood committed suicide and, for what seemed like weeks, the hole in the side of the house remained unfixed. I remember walking by that house every morning at dawn on my paper route and seeing the hole. As a kid, and even now, the idea that the light might have found its way through that hole and illuminated a room where this awful thing happened was such a haunting concept for me.
We often associate light with goodness, hope, etc., but there’s a real duality to the concept of light and, as a writer, that’s a theme to which I’ve often instinctively returned over the years.
If one was looking for a unifying element, it might be the notion that the truth is not an immediate guarantee and is something that needs to be explored rather than simply found.”
Rick Sparkes & The Enablers had a lot of styles to fit into this debut LP, and, haunting concepts aside, each song managed to find a cozy home within this tracklist.