BBR Music Group/BMG

***1/2

Alexander Ludwig is a Canadian actor best-known for his roles in TV series like The Hunger Games and Vikings and movies including The Seeker, Race To Witch Mountain, The Dark Is Rising and Bad Boys For Life. Like several of his fellow actors, he moonlights as a musician. Unlike many of his counterparts, his music has quality and depth—as shown with this Nashville-produced, 5-track debut EP.  He grew up listening to country music, mainly from the 1990s by singers like George Strait, Alan Jackson and Kenny Chesney. Having been given a guitar he started dabbling with writing songs around the age of 12. By this time, he was already an established child actor so the music was very much a side-line hobby. Whilst filming Viking in Ireland, he would often spend off-time performing local pub gigs. This whetted his appetite to take it further, so on his return to America he began making regular trips to Nashville for co-writing sessions and to test the water. On one of these trips, he was recognised at the Nashville airport by Kurt Allison and Tully Kennedy, a couple of Jason Aldean’s band members. They got chatting and offered to help him with his music ambitions. With their support he released his first singles, Let Me Be Your Whiskey, a song he co-wrote with Music Row writer Michael Dulaney in 2020. That led to a contract with BBR and the release of this EP, co-produced by Allison and Kennedy.

Though some of the American media has honed-in on the obvious and quite lazy tagline describing his career transition of being ‘from a Viking to a Cowboy,’ at no time is the music on offer here gimmicky or lacking in substance. His expressive country twang sits comfortably in the easy-on-the-ear 1990s-inspired country arrangements, with lashings of pedal steel, mandolin, fiddle and twangy guitars sitting atop solid rhythm tracks, without the heavy-rock beat that mars so many Nashville productions these days. Keen listeners will probably notice the similarity in his vocal tone and phrasing to Kenny Chesney, but there’s enough of his own little twists and turns to distinguish his sound and style. He had a hand in co-writing just one song, Summer Crazy, which lives up to its title of being a little wild, rebellious and carefree. It’s all there in the driving beat and a guitar riff that pulses with sweet anticipation of what’s to come with the onset of summer.

There’s more enthusiasm for better times ahead with Love Today, with an explosion of energy, delivered with a level of urgency that feels like it has been pent-up, rattling the cage and dying to get out. Malibu Blue is a summer soother that’s more aloe and ice crush than a high-octane workout. Sleepy and smooth, it’s a slow sensuous ode to the perfect romantic partner. Almost unexpectedly Sunset Town shifts from slow and melancholic, to a heavier approach as the guy gets over a break-up, hanging out in bars every evening, drowning his sorrows. How It Rolls celebrates the fine art of living for now, a breathless experience with a girl on his arm and not a care in the world. It’s all very much good-time music, with little or no country heartbreak in sight, but vocally, Alexander Ludwig is convincing and the musical accompaniment is varied, without being overly adventurous.

www.bbrmusicgroup.com

May 2021