Wayne Banks - 'Cold River' (Single Review)
Strip everything back from 'World We Share', trade the festival-ready chorus for something closer to a held breath, and you'll land somewhere near 'Cold River', Wayne Banks' second solo single and a considerable tonal departure from his debut.
Classified as singer/songwriter, folk rock and alternative rock, the track is built as an acoustic rock ballad, leaning on space and restraint rather than the anthemic scale of its predecessor. It's a smart pivot. Banks has spent a career as a working musician rather than a frontman, credited alongside Robin Gibb, Saxon and The Classic Rock Show, and 'Cold River' suggests someone comfortable enough in that experience to know when a song calls for less rather than more.
The track's origins are collaborative: guitarist James Cole supplied the initial acoustic piece, with Banks building a vocal melody and lyrics around it almost immediately. That sense of instinctive, unforced writing carries through into the finished song, which uses its title as a working metaphor throughout, the cold river standing in for hardship, and the narrator as the steady presence wading in alongside someone rather than attempting to pull them out.
It's a more vulnerable piece of songwriting than 'World We Share', and the reference points shift accordingly, closer to Bon Iver, Jeff Buckley and Phoebe Bridgers than the terrace-rock lineage of Oasis and The Jam that shaped his debut, though the grit of Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers still sits somewhere underneath. Recorded at Old School Recording Studios on the Wirral and mastered at Abbey Road, the production gives the song room to breathe without losing definition.
Taken together with 'World We Share', 'Cold River' rounds out a picture of an artist working in more than one register. With debut album 'Ex Libris Wayne Banks' due in November, these two singles increasingly read as opposite poles of a fuller, more complete statement still to arrive.
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