Appleton’s Tom Thiel moves from music hard enough to allow for opening slots at Oshkosh’s metal-heavy Rock USA festival with Boxkar to being a solo folkie incorporating shades of blues and country on his solo debut. Old Shadows commences with the sort of propulsive resonator guitar attack aficionados of Charlie Parr will appreciate to a gentler, more subtly textured singer-songwriter vignettes that are building his reputation on Midwestern adult alternative radio.
Shadows’ nine songs form a loose treatise on resignation and the hope that can rise despite being near the jaws of defeat. What it may lack in ebullience, even as it ends on a number entitled “Sunshine and Lemonade,” it makes up for in keen, reflective song craft that shows Thiel keeping his chin up throughout.
