Highly recommended. 

We hear elements of store favourite singer-songwriter Simon Joyner in Matheson's balladry. 

Recorded during a blood moon in the hotel room outside Joshua Tree where Gram Parsons spent his final hours, Trying reflects on AA Matheson’s encounters with friendship, love, identity, spirituality, grief and trauma.

Written over four years and meticulously edited, the album moves glacially through five tracks, drawing on a love of not only melancholic alt-country balladry but also ambient, neo-classical and minimalist influences. The album departs from Matheson’s previously sparse ‘one mic’ field recording style to feature lush additional instrumentation played by Matheson with the exception of strings performed by Kevin Lo, adding bass, electric guitar, slide and woodwind sections.

On Trying, Matheson tells stories of heartbreakingly reconfigured relationships with people, places and self, reflecting on how natural surrounds have influenced a journey of recovery. The album talks of light, landscapes, trees and animals, how they intersect with memories of violence and how these memories can continue to haunt us, in spite of our best efforts to heal.