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When Nik Freitas isn't weaving his own sun-kissed summer of love melodies, he's the guitarist with Conor Oberst's Mystic Valley Band, often opening for the artist-formerly-known-as-Bright Eyes. In many ways, you could say he is the warm, bright Yin to Oberst's heartfelt but often darker Yang.
His first solo offering in five years, Sun Down is perfectly titled. Opening with the trippy, minimal title track that swims beautifully under slightly Dylan-esque vocals, it floats above an obvious love of a certain strain of late 60s psychedelic folk, the type that was just beginning to re-embrace the blues, all Afghan coats and beaded headbands silhouetted in the light of the pale autumn sun as it sinks towards the horizon across a field of golden corn.
In other words, Sun Down is a beautiful album. Desperately homespun Americana one moment, he shakes hands with the playful pop legacy of The Beatles and The Kinks the next, especially on All The Way Down and It Ain't Like That Anymore. On What You Become and Love Around, he takes the languid lazy summer evening harmonies to the max, daring you to hum along.
The real joy of this record is in its glorious, unpretentious simplicity. Recorded, engineered and produced by Freitas at home, much of it is played on an ancient, antique piano that adds to the feeling of comfortably shabby chic. There's a lived-in feel about his music, partly because it owes its roots to another time and partly because you want to wrap yourself up in it and let the rest of the world wash over you.
Comes To Me flirts with cinematic grandeur, holding itself back with such grace that it becomes a lullaby, waves of cymbal clashes breaking against the shore juxtaposed against one of the most abrupt endings you'll find on the album. From the sudden silence, Shhh wafts in, putting a finger to whispered lips as Freitas says his goodbyes.
It's a million miles from the type of music you'd expect from a man who began his working life as a skateboard photographer - it's easier to imagine him lying back in the grass with a straw beneath his teeth than cataloguing the urban jungle, a legacy of his small-town California upbringing - but this also adds to the sense of innocence that pervades his songs, as if they are composed of music and musical spirit from a simpler, more gentle time.
Freitas might have just finished a UK tour that has seen him caught in Conor Oberst's shadow but it's unlikely he'll stay there for long. Sun Down is a delicate, warm and wonderful album for which he thoroughly deserves his time to shine.
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