Andrew Robert Eustace
The Album
Stories
- Review by Hannah
Eustace Wows Listeners with Breakout Album Stories
Andrew Robert Eustace is a Glasgow blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter who last year released his debut album Stories, an eclectic work with ten distinctive songs that manage to all fit together into one cohesive piece of work.
Especially notable is Eustace’s ability to build an entire song off of a single riff. The riff he chooses always fits with the melody of the song, and in addition, he often plays twangy guitar interludes over the riff. The most impressive and catchy of his riffs features in the album’s opener, “Can’t Wait to See That,” pulling listeners in from the very first note and keeping their attention until the last arpegiatted chord of “Every Single Day.”
Eustace does not shy away from the clichés of the genre—such as in “Running Man,” in which he describes that he has killed a man for kissing his wife and in “The Man,” a song about successfully avoiding police punishment, but he brings a darker energy to the genre that is strangely absent from the music of other modern blues artists. Eustace spoke in an interview about how he almost always writes his music based on life experiences. This would certainly explain the raw emotion in every one of his songs.
Perhaps the strongest of the album’s tunes is “Down in This Valley,” a song in which Eustace takes a step back from the hard-hitting, gritty style that pervades the album up to this point, instead singing a tender love song accompanied by only an acoustic guitar. The song is also a precursor to “Every Single Day,” a similarly slow song that reflects Eustace’s gentler side.
Andrew Robert Eustace may not be well known yet, but his career has already proven that he is a stellar songwriter and guitar player as well as a unique and powerful singer. Success is certainly in Eustace’s future.