Review Summary: A solid debut effort by a singer/songwriter with a good voice and melodic touch.
Coming up with a winning combination as a singer/songwriter is almost like an infinite quest these days when almost anybody is coming up with their own music. For somebody releasing their debut album like Boulder Colorado’s Aya Maguire is with her The Sandcastle King it often goes beyond infinite.
It is not just having a good musical sense, a pleasing singing voice, a solid guitar or piano technique and some lyrics the audience can relate to. You need to push your way through an almost infinite (that word again) queue of other singer/songwriters trying to do the same.
Now, on the evidence of her debut, Aya has all the needed prerequisites - she has a sense for a good melody (“Water Rise”), a very pleasing singing voice which becomes evident from the opener “Oh My Heart”, her guitar playing is quite accomplished (“Two to Fold”) and she doesn’t restrict her arrangements to the standard ‘bare bones’ of voice/guitar with some good backing rhythm section and string arrangements, including her own cello playing, making some songs that could have sunk to the bottom (“Child’s Play”) still swim through the waters of listenability. And even though her lyrics usually remain in the fields of personal and human relationships, she is able to escape the mundane quarters of so-called navel-gazing (“Colors”).
Although The Sandcastle King is her debut, Aya has spent quite some time in coming up with this album, as it took her six years to really complete it and this shows a certain level of maturity really required to come up with a singer/songwriter album that escapes personal indulgence and is something you are really able to listen through more than once.
Two questions remain open though. The first one is how do you break through with such a music with thousands of other artist trying to do the same with similar musical style and goals. The second, a question that comes up with almost any debut album, what is the artist, in this case, Aya Maguire, able to come up with next that will make his/her music grow. On the evidence of The Sandcastle King, she shows the promise that could be waited for.
