A Review of Sam Gelston – ‘See Through Now’
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Sam has a particular kind of artistic honesty that can only be achieved by removing the safety nets entirely: no producer softening the rough edges, no label executive asking for another take, no studio polish covering the moments where the voice cracks or the note misses its mark.
Sam Gelston’s new album See Through Now, written, performed and recorded in its entirety in his bedroom, is built from exactly that philosophy, and the result is one of the most genuinely intimate and emotionally unguarded records to emerge from the Boston independent scene in recent memory.
Sam arrives at this nine-track collection with a biography that has taken him through drumming, self-taught guitar, a debut EP and full-length album as a solo artist, a detour into alternative punk outfit Hands of Spite, and a stint contributing drums to Lenny Lashley’s Gang of One. That range of experience gives See Through Now a musical intelligence that its deliberately imperfect surface never obscures: these are well-constructed songs that have chosen rawness rather than arrived at it by accident.
The album opens with ‘I’m Coming to LA to Kill You’, a darkly comedic love letter to a best friend who relocated across the country, and that opening gambit establishes the record’s defining tonal balance immediately: humour and heartbreak held in the same moment, neither undermining the other. Gelston has a genuine gift for absurdism as an emotional coping mechanism, the kind of sideways approach to difficult material that Elliott Smith and Big Star both understood: the funny line that lands harder than the serious one precisely because you were not expecting it.
The range across the nine tracks is considerable. ‘Who You Are’ examines isolation within a relationship. ‘IDKY’ navigates the tentative process of reconnecting after a fractured friendship. ‘Lazy Too’ confronts depression and self-doubt with the directness that only lo-fi recording’s proximity allows. ‘Somethings Last a While’ showcases what the press material accurately identifies as Gelston’s fascination with unsettling language and unconventional beauty, familiar sentiments transformed into imagery that catches you slightly off guard.
The emotional apex is ‘Make It Make Sense’, written in the aftermath of Gelston’s diagnosis with kidney failure and preserved from an iPhone demo that captured what he recognised as an unrepeatable moment of vulnerability. That decision, to keep the demo rather than re-record it, is the album’s most revealing creative choice and its most powerful one. The song functions as both reckoning and declaration, confronting mortality while insisting on the necessity of continuing.
“See Through Now is a retrospective of my life up to this point,” Gelston says. “Every song is its own little life and death while trying to hold onto a sense of absurdism. Things are strange, life is strange, I’m strange, and so are you.”
That last sentence is the key to the record’s emotional generosity: the strangeness is shared rather than exceptional, the absurdity of existence acknowledged as common ground. See Through Now is an album rooted in the belief that beauty emerges from imperfection, and it makes that argument convincingly across every one of its nine quietly extraordinary tracks.
