Anthony Garcia’s ‘Acres of Diamonds’ Sparkles As Cinematic Americana

Anthony Garcia | Acres of Diamonds | (self-released)
4 out of 5 stars

Videos by American Songwriter

The cliché is that it takes your whole life to prepare for your first album and a year to write its follow-up.

Americana singer/songwriter Anthony Garcia is very much aware of that for this debut. It includes the first recordings of songs he has been collecting and playing live, some dating back fourteen years. Since there are only nine tracks, Garcia clearly thought long and hard before choosing each one from his catalog. The results confirm the fruits of that process.

Multi-instrumentalist Garcia (piano and guitar) ladles out what his bio correctly describes as “cinematic Americana.” He moves from rocking Crazy Horse styled guitar workouts (the intense seven minute “Apparitions”) to tender, dreamy, acoustic, string enhanced love songs with eerie whistling (“Jane”). Arguably the best tracks though fall between those two extremes.

Songs like the opening “Santa Rosa” take the cinematic description literally in lyrics of “We took the winding roads out to the cliffs/Past Alfred Hitchcock’s church, the hollowed out redwood trees/Stacked by the graveyard, looking over the ocean.” They are placed atop reverbed guitar and crying fiddle in a stripped down but beautifully constructed Spaghetti Western lope that makes the most of its tumbleweed strewn sound. The ominous atmosphere of “Haunted House” with its tinkling piano, harp, and crying violin is reflected in words that shift from “In an empty desert town/The people gather ‘round/Near the wishing well” to “In an empty desert town/The people slowly drown /In the wishing well.” It seems like another movie waiting to be made. 

Garcia’s affable, often vulnerable, voice is flexible enough to deliver the tougher tracks but is particularly affecting on tender selections like the touching, orchestral “For Your Love” (not the Yardbirds tune) and the haunting piano based “The Wind.” On the latter Garcia sings “I caught the Wind/Dancing by herself again/Whispering/The leaves in circles” which, like many of his songs, is both poetic and impressionistic. When he sings “My hands are my eyes/And I can see daylight in the sounds of the clouds/Breaking straight through to the heart of the matter/Barely make a splash in the fire” with overdubbed guitars roaring, it sounds similar to a revved up Drive-By Truckers.

The well-traveled, multi-lingual Garcia (he speaks five languages) is based out of Austin, Texas but spends much of his time touring in Europe. Now with this first release, perhaps more Americans will sample his substantial talents, post-pandemic of course.

Let’s hope his next release is just as impressive.

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