Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Stef Burns League
Label: 57 Records
Release date: 20.01.2014
Runtime: 47:11
Rating: 4.5/5
Stef Burns is yet another guitar wizard who has left his mark on albums by acts and artists like Alice Cooper, Y&T and Huey Lewis & The News, and for the last twenty years he’s been a regular in the crew that tours and records studio albums for Italian superstar Vasco Rossi (for summer 2014 he’s already booked four straight shows with Vasco at Milan’s gigantic San Siro stadium). Originally from Oakland near San Francisco, Stef has lived in Bologna, Italy, for years now, where he’s also happily married. He’s seen as a refined virtuoso and musical visionary who leaves his own clearly crafted signature on every record he touches. Be it a guitar ornament, a phrase, or the thing that’s most prized in this expressively layered guitarist: the way his guitar speaks in the parts meant for improvisation.
True, Stef is busy nonstop with plenty of »employers«, which is probably exactly why he hasn’t released many solo studio works over his career. »Roots And Wings« is really only his third proper solo studio album. Even though we’re talking about a solo studio album, Stef is backed on it by a crew of seasoned, highly respected musicians he clicked with so well in the studio that it made sense to expand the whole thing a bit. Into a band. Hence the fitting name of the act behind this album: Stef Burns League. Behind the drums he’s planted Juan van Emmerloot, the keys are handled by the great master Fabio Valdemarin from Trieste, who also works with Vasco Rossi, and the bass and backing vocals come from the one-of-a-kind Roberto Tiranti, considered a real little Glenn Hughes of the younger generation of Italian rock and metal musicians (in February 2010 Tiranti played Ljubljana’s Cvetličarna with Labyrinth, as openers for the Finns Sonata Arctica). These three are also credited as co-writers of the music and lyrics on »Roots And Wings«.
What »Roots And Wings« offers is a one-of-a-kind middle road between ultra-melodic catchiness and experimentation, delivered to the album by the rich imaginative world of Stef Burns the artist, let’s just call him a guitar hero. You can feel on the album that Stef is deeply connected to the music he plays with Huey Lewis and The News and Vasco Rossi. With Vasco he’s gathered a huge amount of experience. Those are the filigree finesses he carries over into his own sound and style from both of these seasoned artists. You can tell Stef grew up on The Beatles and Electric Light Orchestra. All the songs have a well-crafted beginning and end, and with that an extremely tight, compact feel, peaking in catchy choruses. Burns loves to add retro seventies string arrangements, which further deepens his fascination with Electric Light Orchestra. Stef Burns is also an excellent singer, nature has blessed him with a gorgeous natural timbre that’s tailor-made for the melodies of his songs. On the other hand, if we set aside his remarkable ingenuity in forging hooky melodic tunes and the flawless way verses and choruses play off each other, the factor that gives Stef Burns his element of unique authorial voice is his exceptionally refined sense for dosing all these melodic forms with just the right amount of experimentation in his guitar playing.
The experimental element is so delicately tuned that with these finesses Stef actually achieves optimal coloring and shaping of the songs. Let me not overcomplicate things! From the »mid-eight« sections, where even the progressive character of the songs comes through and where Burns impresses with masterful solutions that carve out free space for the musician (within the harmonized motifs) so he can fully express his improvisational inspiration, all the way to the moment where the musician returns to the core of the composition with splendid transitional moves. That means he smartly »catches himself« again in any given song just before the final chorus kicks in! Stef Burns is a true master at this! It’s precisely this quality I just described that is the biggest gem of this album, its greatest charm.
The songs make for an incredibly varied record. Tracks can be loaded with funky blues coquettishness, stuffed with cheeky verses, like the title track Roots & Wings. The rhythm section does outstanding work on this one too, led by Roberto Tiranti’s melodically crafted bass lines and the sensual laying down of rhythms by the refined drummer Juan van Emmerloot. The instrumentals Cover You and Us lay bare Stef Burns’ multifaceted side as a guitarist, which puts him right alongside similarly unique sages from Michael Landau to Carl Verheyen and Steve Lukather. Burns places his notes with feeling the whole way through. He never sprinkles them around. He scatters them delicately. In places he even rescues the improvised parts by laying down a sequence of licks that express the given melodic form, which then gets folded into part of the improvisation. These two instrumental tracks are a first-rate showcase of the progressive element that »Roots & Wings« carries. Burns masterfully fuses elements of jazz, rock, pop and blues. These transitions are barely noticeable at first listen, which means the music carries a nice dose of eclectic seasoning. So yes, this is an art rock album. The hard rock roots show up most openly in the opener What Doesn’t Kill Us, which was also released as a single. Then there are the tracks that matter most to the album, the ones that reveal its melodic elements (The Beatles & Electric Light Orchestra), which the closing Patience sums up especially well. It’s considered one of the album’s most beautifully rounded compositions. So are Home Again, an otherwise gorgeous acoustic piece, effectively backed by string arrangements, where the sensual, expressive character of Stef’s vocals really sparkles, and then Something Beautiful or Paper Cup. Miracle Days carries some modern alternative rock flavor in its arrangement, which will be interesting for fans of U2 and/or Coldplay.
This is an album that will win over, in an instant, everyone who’s looking for unique music with something to say and organically alive sonic depth. It has it all. Incredible tightness of beautiful melodies, a perfect blend of blue-tinged genre fusion, the brilliant chemistry of four building blocks, the warm, heartfelt vocals of Stef Burns. A remarkable mix of melody and solo wizardry – that is, musical experimentation. An album you can’t add anything to or take anything away from. An outstanding piece of work, whose ideas, given how polished every song is, must have needed years to ripen!
Lineup
Stef Burns – vocals, guitar
Fabio Valdemarin – keyboards, guitar, backing vocals
Roberto Tiranti – bass, backing vocals
Juan Van Emmerloot – drums, percussion, backing vocals
Production
Masaki Liu & Stef Burns
Tracklist
1. What Doesn’t Kill Us
2. Something Beautiful
3. Miracle Days
4. Home Again
5. Paper Cup
6. Cover You
7. Sky Angel
8. Heaven Is Blue
9. Roots & Wings
10. Us
11. Patience
