A TON OF COLOURS is the luminous new art rock offering from Melbourne’s Ryan Downey, an album that pulsates with love and curiosity. At the forefront of the record is Downey’s breathtaking voice - a rich baritone with a dramatic range that can shift from a rumbling purr up to a vulnerable crescendo, recalling the all-terrain vocals of Bryan Ferry and David Bowie. It gets shaky, it gets elegant and it gets theatrical while staying unwaveringly sincere.
Downey enlisted award-winning Canadian-Australian producer Burke Reid for this record after hearing the sophisticated rawness Reid brought to Julia Jacklin’s Crushing and Courtney Barnett’s Tell Me How You Really Feel albums. “I’d written these big drama-filled songs that I wanted to be represented vividly and playfully,” explains Downey, “but balanced with realness in the recordings, which Burke understood immediately.” The resulting production has a saturated, electrifying heft that hits deep and is genuinely emotional, saluting recent re-defining guitar records by artists like Big Thief and Anna Calvi.
As an album, A TON OF COLOURS heaves, flickers and radiates with a powerful tenderness. It’s open, adventurous and wants to take you with it.
