Review: Robbie Bennett - Sister / Light On Your Face (American Dreams) [Ambient Piano]

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  The album cover for Robbie Bennett's Circulation album

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  The album cover for Robbie Bennett's Steloken album

Robbie Bennett is best known as the long-serving, atmosphere-providing keyboard player and occasional guitarist for Philly's The War on Drugs, a seal of approval if ever there was one. Accomplished multi-instrumentalists rarely take one for the team for long though, and in 2021 - surely a big year for releases after the age of virus - he released his space-rock-indebted, genre-fluid, far-out debut album, Permanent World, that crossed stylistic borders and probably a couple of parallel dimensions along the way. Well, he's back. And... he's different.

You wait for five years for a release to come along, and then two arrive at once. Bennett has obviously been busy and has decided to release a pair of albums - Steloken and Circulation, in December via the ever-great American Dreams label. To announce the forthcoming music, he's boldly released a track from each album on the same single. 'Sister' is taken from Steloken, and 'Light On Your Face' is taken from Circulation. I hope you're keeping up.

Sensibly, both singles sing from the same ambient piano song sheet, and are affable companions, and from the press release, the albums sound like they will be similarly complimentary too. The idea being that Steloken is a home for straighter-shooting synth meets piano compositions, and Circulation heads off into more abstract and improvised territory, but at the moment, he's leading us by the hand and keeping things simple, with two reflective, soothing tracks that are available together on your streaming service of choice, and which will suit you well whilst seated, preferably in a comfortable chair in a low-lit room, and staring at a wall rather than your phone. Try it, it will do you some good.

For a longer ambient piano dive, you could do a lot worse than head over to Amble's places across the water album, it's a lovely listen too.

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Playlist Companion

Find Bennett in the Slow Neoclassical Playlist.