DL Byron – Satori LP

DL Byron – Satori LP

SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.com/dlbyron/sets/satori

Fusing jovial, easy going psychedelic pop with the reverent urgency of post-punk, rock n’ roll singer/songwriter DL Byron shines bright in his new EP Satori; a four song disc into the heart and soul of his creative ethos. Byron is by no means a new face in the music industry, and in the last thirty years he’s made an impact on independent and mainstream music that few others could ever stake a claim to. In his latest outing we see him at his most refined and removed, a songwriter who is at the very center of his self-realization period and ready to share with us what he’s learned along the way. I was half expecting Satorito have a distinctly darker tone to it, as is the case with many records released in this chapter of an artist’s career, to my surprise I found an extended play brimming with vitality and lively optimism. If anything DL Byron has gotten a little more open to the wildness of life than he was previously, but his musical integrity remains unchanged.

There’s no getting around the fact that Satori is built around its star track, “No. 1 God,” a fiery power ballad that sums up the artistic perspective that Byron has championed since his career’s inception, but I personally found “All Fall Down” to be the most attractive song on the EP. Featuring emotionally charged lyrics that play off of the significance of retrospection, listeners are invited to get as close to Byron as they ever have been before, only to see that this vulnerable moment comes at a great cost to the artist himself. There’s a certain price that every musician has to pay when they give a piece of themselves over to the audience in a song, and the intimacy demonstrated in “All Fall Down” can be so jarring that it can take several listens to fully appreciate just what is being said and how powerful a message it really is. The song is reason enough alone to pick up a copy of Satori, but it’s far from the only one.

DL Byron proves once and for all that his storied legacy hasn’t even begun to finish writing itself with the release of this new EP, and I for one am thrilled to see how he’s going to follow it up. Some critics think that there is some sort of timer that is automatically set the moment an artist releases their first record, and when the bell goes off that’s it, but we all know that isn’t even close to the case. Byron has just started to really come into his own musically, and I would even go as far as to say that we weren’t getting the full capacity of his songcraft prior to the release of Satori. This is an artist who is ready to give it a hundred percent of himself, and anyone who wants to get in his way had better think twice.

Loren Sperry