Oliver Pesch always has a song in his back pocket waiting to be sung. With that in mind, the title of the Dutch artist’s debut LP, Kid With The Dice, couldn’t be more apt. These 11 songs combine a high roller savvy with a schoolboy charm, extracting inspiration from the details and the cosmic.
“Everywhere there’s a shot of redemption / that’s what I’m looking for here”, Pesch exclaims on breakout single “Shelly (Lollapalooza)”, a bittersweet tale of a man down on his luck who somehow stumbled into a love affair. With that same quizzical abandon, the Rotterdam-based songwriter and musician guides the listener through the twists of fate of his own family history (“The Larger Side Of Life”) and human history as a whole (“Mesopotamia”).
On Kid With The Dice, Pesch reveals a special talent for vivid storytelling, blurring notions of fiction and reality on a whim. As informed by legends like Paul Simon as he is with contemporary songwriters such as Blake Mills, each song feels like opening a door to a whole new scenery, skipping across the stomp-and-rollick of “That’ll Be It” and The Style Council-reminiscent “You Found A Lover” . “I always listen to songwriters looking for original ways of storytelling, whether through music or through lyrics. The arrangement has to tell its own story. I find it important that songs have a concept behind them that is well thought out.”
Even the most melancholic moments on the album exudes a tender, eloquent joy. Additionally, the arrangements and production values are both precise and flexible: the folk-tinged “Sheila & Andy” dissolves in a glimmering guitar jam with acclaimed Dutch musician Bertolf Lentink, whereas “Without A Hand To Hold” takes off into the great blue yonder like a lost Fleetwood Mac-classic.
Furthermore, Kid With The Dice puts his versatile brilliance on full display; Oliver Pesch is up for anything and ready to roll. “I like playfulness. I don't like sitting still: when I've written a song in one type of corner in the songwriter genre, I usually feel like moving on to something else. And above all, I want to continue challenging myself in that.”
