By Josh Rose
Don’t you all just hate that one guy in the park or at the train station that plays his guitar and stares at you, hoping you’ll put some change in his guitar case? Somehow Greg Rekus managed to scrounge up enough change to produce an album.
The guy is an experienced guitarist, but some singing lessons might not have hurt him or our ears. After a decade with High Five Drive, a melodic hardcore band based out of Winnipeg, the former punk rocker was inspired to go the way of the acoustic stomp-boxing solo artistry after attending a gospel music workshop. There is not an ounce of gospel on his debut album The Dude Abides, which is titled after the Jeff Bridges character in the Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski. Rekus makes use of a stomp-box with tambourines to keep time and add an element of percussion.
Being a solo artist playing both guitar and percussion, Rekus exercised a great amount of instrumental dexterity to come up with decent songs, like “Albert Song” and “I Guess That’s My Excuse,” and not-so-good ones, like “No Work Today.” The few salvageable tunes are definitely worth the spare change in Rekus’s guitar case but, this album? Not quite.