If you have to choose a great musician to study as a basis for your art, who would it be?  While most connoisseurs would probably mention a Beetle or Stones member, perhaps a guitar god or a pop presence, there are still a good handful left who would choose the living legend of alien-folk blues, Bob Dylan.  There are few better to apprentice under.  With Dylan’s songs perhaps creating more fame for others then himself, he is truly a bard’s musician.  The level of greatness is so high that it is often overlooked by the common listener, and that is what makes it good enough to be great.  Dylan rode the wave of a generation where power suddenly displaced from institutions to bare-foot hippy kids on college campuses with his folk style the organic anthem of peace and understanding.  Colin Rink’s Bury Me Deep in the Ground may be riding a similar wave of time; a resonance with the potential to inspire a new generation.   Rink’s sound advice, down to earth sensibility, truthful lyrics, and heartfelt stories resonate with the maladies currently being felt by millions as they begin to cope with troubles that most of us only heard our grandparents speak of.  The picture of the earthquake rift on the back of the album, namesake of the 1^st song, “SF Earthquake of 1906”, although historical, is brought to the forefront.  Rink is hinting everywhere that history will repeat itself. He does this without ever being allegorical or some doomsayer but, rather as an honest precaution against what we should already be prepared for, although all seem to forget with time.  This album makes one uncomfortable in the best way.  The problems being examined by Rink in the song “It’s A Comin’”, stretch from the personal to the global, presenting the choice of morality on all levels at once, challenging you to find the right way without ever revealing an agenda or hidden intention, but rather a stern warning on an apocalyptic future where the survivors will be determined by the fate of their decisions.  It is neither negative nor positive.  There are references to God, though never any alignment to a specific dogma.  It is refreshing to hear such bipartisan wisdom that holds such high respect for science and spirituality alike, boiling it down to common sense.  This is the sort of down to earth reality good folk music should always have. 

I’ve got to admit, I am being easier on Colin than I would be on most singers because he’s a songwriter with a guitar and a harmonica on a neck rack.  His singing at times, is a form of folk that in its inspired unpolished truth, the soaring diphthongs slide steps sharp or flat in a sort of neo-blues, swaying to incredibly insightful brilliant lyrics, in reminiscence of artists spanning the last century –with that sort of genius goes technical forgiveness.  In fact, I never want him to sound perfectly on pitch, it just wouldn’t be right.  One wishes for more sustained power in note resolution perhaps; however  it is in the trembling moments, the bold cries, the intense visions of the future, the rambling frets over humanity, the wisdom of lifetimes he didn’t live but salvages nonetheless in song, that we see the real raw expression of a true artist.  His emphasis on historical lore and current society make these potentially legendary lyrics.  It is easy to imagine the meaning of these songs holding for decades to come, being covered by various pop-artists perhaps, all along with Rink at the core, giving truth to lyrics in an age of pseudo-texting emoticons and plastic writing.  Just like Bob Dylan in the early 60’s, it seems Colin Rink is divining the future out for those wise enough to listen.  His knowledge of the past is so vivid that the future has become clear in metaphor.  “1984 is comin,’ … at least in the movies it was so clear… Sadness is comin,’ it’s gonna make the depression of the 30s look like a picnic.  These Godly powers are gonna make you sick.”  These lyrics transcend time and culture.  Indeed, it does make me sick as thoughts of my grandparents tales of the depression coupled with the famine and genocide of other places in the world, this made me think that perhaps the perpetual war in Orwell’s classic has been here all along.  Of course, George didn’t count on telecommunication being available to the masses for creative expression and it seems he had little faith in humanity or anything otherwise in his dystopia.  Rink, on the other hand, seems the society for what it is: everything.  There are places now like 1984, there are places where these “global” ailments aren’t even noticeable and things continue on as they have for thousands of years, yet all these are rapidly becoming homogenized despite antiquity.  Rink has kept me up well past the dawn thinking about his visions of the world.  It is too early to call Colin a prophet, or anything of the sort, however I for one am grateful that striving artists such as he remind us of these epic tragedy so that some day we may live to see safer happier lives in the future and that we live in places great enough that we may freely hear such poetry.  Bury your mind deep in his lyrics so you won’t end up in the ground when the time comes, be it in natural disaster or love gone awry, this is music for the wise, ways to live and balance life. 

Reviewed By Julian Gorman

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