Luke James Williams - Our Blood Is Red (2022)

At this moment, Luke James Williams is caught up in a whirlwind and doesn’t even realise it. With his first album, Our Blood Is Red, just being released, he is about to be caught in the eye of the hurricane. He is a writer of rare talent, a singer with the ability to rivet your attention, and an artist ready to break out and claim his rightful place at a time when new voices are needed more than ever.

Rather than leaping out of the speakers, “This Says” opens with a simply strummed guitar, staying that way for the first verse, as Williams begins to outline the transgressions that have doomed this relationship. “I can’t take back the words I said to you/ They’re buried by the weight of too many truths/ But not about you I’m losing count of the times/ And I know too well “sorry” starts to grate after a while.” The bass booms its way into the mix as Williams gets to the heart of the matter, “But at my most fragile all my fears and doubts, veiled by anger, will all come spilling out/ But this says nothing about you/ It says everything about me.” For an opening song, there is a palpable sense of sadness, yet the quotient of truth contained in the song is extraordinarily high.

Situations change, and “Blood Jump” heralds the beginning of new love. Part of what makes this song so remarkable is the way Williams can simply put words to the feelings that we all experience. From the opening lines, “You’ll never know/ You’ll never know the things you do to me/ The way the earth bends under my feet.” Even better is the chorus, where he makes things even clearer, “You make my blood jump around/ I start to taste colours and I start to see sound/ You make my blood jump around.” It’s a remarkable ability to put words to concepts that we feel rather than express. Accurately understanding the emotions and committing them to paper is remarkably difficult, yet Williams seems to do it almost effortlessly.

Amidst love requited and un-, “Punchbag” illustrates a wicked sense of humour. “I must have one of those faces that’s crying out for a fist in it/ There must be a sign on my demeanor that says/ Come on over you can treat me like shit.” The tom-tom is over cranked to sound punch-drunk, while an organ sounds a bit funereal as if this is one boxer who’s come to the end of his road. Producer Nick Kozuch finds a way to match sounds to moods that bring even more meaning to Williams’ songs.

Our Blood Is Red is an album that would stand out whenever it was released. The fact that it is Luke James Williams’s debut long player only serves to underline the point that releases of this calibre are infrequent at the best of times. Luke James Williams has arrived.