Press
Some Nice Things People Have Said
About Flowers, EverGreens and Louise
Excuse me, I don't write reviews much.
There are a some great albums in my lifetime that I have been gifted that gobsmacked me enough to jam the cassette or CD into my car stereo and compel me to listen to it exclusively for an entire season.
I can think of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, The Dukes of Stratosphear, the Big Star albums, etc. Whether it was the miraculously refreshing sound, or the sudden musical departure, or production complexity that kept revealing itself with each listen, I wanted to wrap those albums around me like a blanket.
Which brings me to Adam Bernstein's new recording, "Flowers, Evergreens and Louise". I must say, this is a wonderful album.
It at once fits into what could be a classic "psychedelic-era" recording, an "original cast recording" from a hit Broadway musical, or a contemporary "alternative" album. It's great. I've listened to it five times in a row.
"Margie and the Marxist (a mini mini opera)" is a witty piece of musical dialog that could easily be placed in the middle of a Broadway musical.
"You Make Me Dance the Cha Cha" made me want to dance with my dog (okay. so I'm alone in my house).
"Fort Lee Skyline" is THAT song that you listen to driving with your hand out of the window surfing air currents like a sine wave.
Every song is great, let's face it. It's a revelation.
The album is beautifully recorded and instrumented. You must listen to it in FLAC.
Maestro Adam, I have known you for a long time. I must say this is beautiful album that you can surely be proud of. I cannot congratulate you enough. I love this album. - John Paccione, fan
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Both Neil Young and Adam Bernstein have released a bunch of new musics in the last few hours. Neil with Light a Candle, among other things. And Adam’s newrecord Flowers, Evergreens, and Louise. I’m propping them both bc they’re both great but Neil doesn’t need the exposure as much, though he also deserves it!
Adam’s Flowers is great. Really great. Positive vibes throughout, even in woe and woeful times like now. Here’s the short list of the most finely extracted juices:
Atom LSD
Where Have You Gone, Pete Brown?
Margie and the Marxist
Tree of Woe
You Bought Me the Bhagvad Gita
Fort Lee Skyline
and the spot-on Acid Dickens.
I’m waiting for the EP of covid specific songs - they’re not on here - and perhaps for good reason. As Neil says, and Adam does, light a candle for where we are going. - Mike Crockford, fan
Bread. That’s what I thought while listening to Adam Bernstein’s latest album, The D n A Singles. When we were kids in the 70’s, Bread was like The Carpenters: a soft-rock band that put out catchy pop music and was perceived by critics as somehow lesser because of its commercial success. In the 80’s, we laughed at Bread. Then again, much of what we listened to in the 80’s sounds far more dated than Bread or The Carpenters at their most mediocre. We can grasp now that Bread was a top-shelf pop group that took a Beatlesque knack for unforgettable melodies and applied it to a more acoustic-based guitar/piano backing.
Adam has been at this a long time, through the early 90’s with the rollicking hippie collective All God’s Children, to various stints as side man with people like David Driver and Jonathan Coulton, and a handful of solo albums released in the 00’s whenever he could scare up the studio time and inspiration to record on his own. While each album has shown progress, The D n A Singles feels like a great leap forward. I’m reminded of George Harrison busting out on All Things Must Pass, releasing all that stored up creative energy from being a side man all those years.
He’s found a place musically where all his influences come through: Lennon, McCartney, Wilson, Rundgren, Nilsson, Chilton, Carmen, etc. I’m glad that he found money enough to hire a string section for certain songs (“Always,”) and am willing to bet he did the arrangements himself. I was surprised how seamlessly he was able to fuse Indian tabla, strings, organ and electric guitar all through “I Wanna Go with You.” My favorite track of the album, “Like the Sun Loves the Moon” rolls out like a logical follow-up to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky.”
Easily sandwiched between Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone' and the Beatles 'Hey Jude'..
- The Courier News
Led by bassist Adam Bernstein, whose influences lie more in classic jazz arrangers like Sun Ra and Charles Mingus, uses those influences to beef up an addicting style of pop.
- Internet Music Service
The songs written by Bernstein resonate amongst those of us who are trapped in the concrete jungle. The memories of lost loves, unattained loves and desired loves flood all who listen with images of their own experience.
- Vos Valley News
Bernstein provides fine original songs including "Room For The New" and "Long Way Down."
Adam Bernstein has the pop sensibilities of someone who has listened to the best pop music of the last 40 years and digested it. He's created a record that is catchy and finely crafted, without being flawless and sterile. His lyrics are alternately cosmic, funny, and charmingly down-to-earth.
- Bob Cohen
Wilson, Nilsson, Costello and Lennon...add Adam Bernstein to the list. What a find!!!
- L. Pettine
I discovered Adam Bernstein's music quite serendipitously, but, boy, what a find! Everything on "Yo Mama Yo" is brilliant. The writing, arrangements, performances, and production all excel. AB's songs are delightfully tuneful, with enough melodic and chordal surprises to keep listeners on their toes. The band are lively and cohesive, and they play with great sensitivity. Sound quality is crisp and clear. Fans of melodic, intelligent pop (think Lennon, Neil Finn, etc.) will delight. Clearly the work of a master craftsman of song!
- Anonymous
Jonathan Coulton, along with bassist Adam Bernstein and drummer Christian Cassan are remarkable musicians, effortlessly running through a set which would have put lesser bands on their backs and proving that a colossal work ethic is as much a part of nerd music as intellect and self deprecation.
Great singer-songwriter pop, with great melodies and thoughtful lyrics. Somewhere in between Mead/Rouse/Johnston, Ben Folds (more in the manner of sensibility rather than piano) Steven Mark, Paul Schneider and Joe Ongie. Highlight track: "The Poets of Avarice". This one has serious year-end list potential.
As I draft a review of Brooklynite Adam Bernstein’s newest offering, I Remember All Your Dreams, I find myself giggling at the irony of the title of the first track. “I Forgot the Winter” opens with an extended, tuneful introduction with bass as featured instrument. “Bass player” is how I know Adam Bernstein, but this intro sets a tone, like a gong rung in a yoga class. It sends a message to the listener to “Come inside. It’s cold out there”. Well, as Bernstein tells it, it is very cold out there, but the “inside” is a wonderland. And as one would expect from a wonderland, this bass intro gives way to a full Nilsson-esque whimsy, akin to Dorothy opening the door on Oz for the very first time.
Don’t think that Bernstein will let you stay there forever though. We are on a journey, and a-journeying we will go. Bernstein has penned both a very sweet, and a very grave, collection of songs that are laid over with honest production the likes of which you rarely hear these days. Songs like “Sharon Wants to Go to the Moon” and “Carol Ann Died” are reminiscent of Neil Young at his most sentimentally country (“Carol Ann” even has a mention of Young; a purposeful homage.) Add to this rockers like “Lovers On Trains”, (which could be a Robyn Hitchcock song…and that’s just fine with me) and outright calls to action like “Fuck the Fascists” (which Woody Guthrie would probably have written if he were around today…also totally fine by me) and you’ve got a Steinbeckian soundscape any modern-day radical can find the good in.
Bernstein’s vocal delivery is plain and true in the best possible ways, and while his lyrics are straightforward, they are the work of a smith for certain. With all these attributes I feel a little bad admitting that my favorite piece is the full instrumental “The Deep Sadness Within the Lunatic In Charge”. Here, Bernstein has composed a winsome work steeped in the empathy someone we all know is lacking. It brings to mind the soundtracks of your favorite, idiosyncratic European films. (Think Yann Tiersen’s work on Amelie, if Amelie was trying to singlehandedly fix Donald Trump and make him into a good person.)
“Deep Sadness” also serves as a sort of introduction to the finale portion of the album. The final, title track brings us back again to some of the profuse production of the very first, but it also lingers quietly a while with a false end, as if coming in and out of the dream. As a complete album, I Remember All Your Dreams is a dinner dance with plenty of sweet and sour and meaty courses. Like the lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Banquet”, it isn’t afraid to use beauty to tell tales of emotional and literal poverty, but fear not. By the end, we reach Oz, and it is good and green. – Alexis Moon, musician
The songwriter Adam Bernstein has long been a passionate advocate for social and economic justice, and his latest release, I Remember All Your Dreams, was produced at a dark time in our nation; it would be unsurprising if he had followed up his 2017 EP, Horrible Orange Man, with something even angrier, given that we find ourselves deeper in a frightening societal hole than ever. But that is not what we find on this graceful, tempered set of songs.
Bernstein is still disturbed about the outside world; “I Melted All The Guns” is a whimsical fantasy delivered in a melodic pop package, and the folky “Fuck The Fascists”could have been a track David Peel never got around to recording. On a more serious note, the direct portraits of our mad president, “The King of Bad Feeling,” and the instrumental “The Deep Sadness Within The Lunatic In Charge,” could just as easily apply to damaged people all of us may have encountered in our lives, and may even inspire empathy for them.
But interpersonal relations and character studies have always been where Bernstein struck the most songwriting gold, and this time is no different. His gift for melody has never been more apparent in ballads like the wistful, country-ish “Sharon Wants To Go To The Moon,” the haunting “Carol Ann Died,” or “I Remember All Your Dreams”, which could have been a 1920s British music-hall hit. But “Lovers On Trains,” “The King…” and “Playing With Sound” remind you once again that the guy is also a rocker at heart.
“Playing With Sound,” which mixes in electronica, also brings to mind that Bernstein’s production methods have varied on his past collections, some edging toward the low-fi (Dancing On A Minefield), others having a more-produced sheen (Dust Off The Timeless Night). All that experience has paid off: I Remember All Your Dreams occupies the happiest of mediums, sounding neither too homespun nor too cold, bringing to each song exactly the soundscape it demands. Having the variety of songs mentioned above requires such an eclectic approach. Also impressive on this set is that despite the presence of such longtime colleagues as Paul Carbonara, Leon Gruenbaum, and a few other musicians, Bernstein is more than ever playing most of the instruments himself. His art and craft as a songwriter, producer, and performer have reached new plateaus with I Remember All Your Dreams.
- Matthew Snyder, music archivist
It’s hard to emphasize album covers in the digital age, but the cover of Adam Bernstein’s new album, I Remember All Your Dreams says a lot. That’s him, paying tribute to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, walking his muse down a rainy street in Brooklyn instead of West 4th Street in winter. As much as the cars and property values have changed in both places, Adam pulled a Dylan in terms of creating and recording most of the music alone in his apartment. Notable exceptions are the drums played by David Butler throughout, and tasteful cello backing by Eleanor Norton on songs like “I Forgot About the Winter.” I had to ask Adam a few times who was playing what on the album, only to learn he was playing just about everything. The instruments I thought I was hearing, like the steel guitar on “Sharon Wants to Go to the Moon” was him meticulously arranging samples to make it all sound live and seamless.
I have to trot out the usual suspects in terms of influences: Harry Nilsson, Lou Reed, The Beatles, Nick Drake, Alex Chilton, etc. Unlike our freewheeling days, Adam gets into themes of loss on tracks like “Carol Ann Died,” “If You Want to Walk” and the title track. He’s grown as a lyricist, a middle-aged man now, having lost some things along the way and found a few others, writing like an adult, which is about the highest compliment I can pay any musician lasting this long. I know he’s not doing it for the money, and everyone knows, any fool holding a guitar is bound to get laid. He’s doing it for love of music, his art, his craft, the ones who inspire him, those who get him, the lost chord that eludes his grasp. So long as he has a bedroom, his vast array of instruments and equipment, and a trusty Mac with Logic Pro running on it, he clearly has the talent and drive to make music this good for years to come. I hope his neighbors are patient. –William Repsher, writer