You could class Tokyo Rosenthal as a prime example of the modern day troubadour if it were not for the fact that nobody has the patience for the lessons that can be learnt from the past anymore. You might even class Tokyo Rosenthal as the guiding light of the Americana genre if it were not for the fact that Americana is a genre forever stuck in reverse gear. Tokyo Rosenthal is therefore something of an anachronism in these times.
The reason for that? Tokyo Rosenthal is a story teller with a gift for translating everyday happenings into song. This time around, he is in a distinctly sentimental mood and, throughout his album “Afterlife”, he ponders things lost and never to be found again. So whilst a song like “The Cold War” seems like a gleeful parallelism of the paranoia of the past and the pseudo freedom of the present, it is also evidence that mind and guitar can work as one. Elsewhere, as in “Back Stage Hotel” and “Bury My Ashes”, he seems searching for the right allegory to explain the death of values once held dear but he does so in a manner that is more inspirational than you might at first think.
Tokyo Rosenthal is the then thinking man’s songwriter and all the proof of that you will need will be found within the ten songs that make up this album.