The London-based singer, guitarist and songwriter has spent more than two decades passing through bands and cities, and “Forgive Me, Son!”, his second solo single after “Blue Eyed Wolf”, sounds like a man who has stopped waiting for permission. The song looks ten years ahead and asks what the next generation will inherit, and whether truth can survive the din of power and ignorance. That is a heavy brief for 3 minutes and 23 seconds, and Evin carries it with the unfussy swagger of someone who has hauled amps up enough staircases to know what weight feels like.<\/p>
The vocal is the thing. Evin moves between quiet, almost confessional reflection and a forceful, throat-scraping delivery, and the shifts feel earned rather than staged. Where lesser rock singers use loudness as a substitute for feeling, he treats it as the overflow of feeling, the point at which regret can no longer be spoken politely. The anger is real, but it is tethered to tenderness. He is furious at the voices that turn faith into power, yet he never sounds as though he is lecturing. He sounds like a father talking to the one person he cannot afford to lie to.<\/p>
The lyric that lingers is the hope that no fool can bury your truth beneath their ignorance. It is plain and unadorned, closer to a blessing than a slogan, and it lands because Evin sings it as a wish rather than a prophecy. Rock music is littered with songs that declare the world broken. Far fewer dare to say, with a straight face, that it might yet be mended.<\/p> The sound matches the sentiment. The guitars are raw and unvarnished, with the grain left in, and the bass and keys are folded into the arrangement so that they support the song rather than decorate it. The drums are programmed, though the press materials need not have worried about that, because the pulse has a human push to it. It is a small marvel that every note, from tracking to mastering, comes from one pair of hands. Home-built records often betray their solitude through cramped dynamics or a certain airlessness. This one breathes, and it sounds like a room of musicians who happen to share a single face.<\/span><\/p> It also helps that Evin has the nerve to be sincere. Irony is the cheapest armour in modern rock, and he leaves it in the cupboard. A song titled with an exclamation mark and addressed to one’s own child risks sentimentality at every turn, and he steers round it by keeping the writing concrete and the playing gnarly. The tenderness is allowed to stand beside the noise without being drowned by it.<\/span><\/p> “Follow the Path”, as Evin calls the project, already feels like a coherent worldview rather than a marketing label: freedom, resilience, the stubborn belief that change remains possible.<\/span><\/p> “Forgive Me, Son!” is a short, scuffed, big-hearted piece of alternative rock from a musician who has earned the right to be earnest. Play it loud, and then perhaps ring your dad.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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