Gentry Blue: Fragments

The members of this three-piece band from Nashville are Lydia Wynne (lead vocals and electric violin), Sean Jannay (guitar, drums, and backing vocals), and Preston Milne (bass). Their collective list of influences is diverse: Rush to Janis Joplin for Wynne, Meshuggah to Becca Stevens for Jannay, and Jeff Buckley to Chuck Rainey for Milne. They call themselves a “progressive art rock band,� and you can hear elements of that. But you can hear a lot more, as you might expect from those who have affected their musical tastes.

Gentry Blue formed at Belmont University in 2018 and released an EP, Pyrite and Steel, in 2021. Fragments appeared last year and is their first-full length album. It’s good. The album starts out as you might expect given how they describe their music: a nice instrumental showing some prog flourishes. After that, you get nine songs, mostly in the three- to four-minute range, all of which are lyrically dense, highlighting Wynne’s powerful, soulful voice. But Jannay and Milne are always present, with Milne throwing down some interesting bass lines (check out the title track) and Jannay supplying tasty, well-placed, and often surprisingly heavy guitar licks. Wynne’s violin also appears where it nicely complements the other instruments. I would have liked to have heard more of it.

I can see this album appealing to fans of prog, folk, “indie� music from the 1980s and early 1990s, psychedelia, and perhaps most of all just good old early to mid-70s rock and roll. There’s really not a bad track on the album. Fragmentswasn’t what I thought I was going to get, but it more than did the trick for me.

Track Listing
1. Eclipse (2:20)
2. What Lies on the Other Side (4:53)
3. Collide (3:21)
4. 82 on a 55 (2:50)
5. Fragments (3:10)
6. Think I Might Be Crazy (3:07)
7. Blackberry Bitter (4:07)
8. Lose No Sleep (4:37)
9. Become Invisible (3:47)
10. Cutthroat (4:07)

Added: August 25th 2025
Reviewer: Aaron Steelman
Score:
Related Link: Band @ Bandcamp
Hits: 115
Language: english

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