Album Review: Keep Your Chin Up by Tim Hampshire

Australian acoustic punk rocker Tim Hampshire as been playing solo since 2008 and has steadily built up a good following during that time. He has played shows all over the world, including festivals such as The Fest in Gainesville and Pouzza in Montreal. In May he released his latest EP, Keep Your Chin Up. We're big fans of Tim Hampshire, as well as Australia punk music in general, so were keen to check it out.

Keep Your Chin Up begins with Surge Protection. Here we have a powerful and high energy track about being whoever you want to be and always looking forward, never back. Tim has one of those great voices that really lends itself to a great story telling song. He has you captivated from start to finish whilst also empowering you throughout. I Left My Socks In Sacramento is a slower song where Tim sings about life on tour and how it has the ability to help heal you as a person. I instantly enjoyed how different Tim made the song feel to the first just by not strumming on the guitar quite so hard. This song really shows off what a great vocal he has as it grows throughout the song, seemingly getting stronger as he starts to feel better in the narrative of the song. I really appreciate things like that. The EP finishes with Dogman. Dogman is over five and a half minutes long. I have to admit that when I first saw the length of the song I did feel a little bit of dread as I wasn't sure how an acoustic song that long could remain interesting the whole way through – but Tim Hampshire pulls it off. Dogman is about how brilliant dogs are (I agree) and all that they do to help humans, perhaps without the human really realising. The song builds as it goes on and really hits its high point when the gang vocals come in, they sound incredible.

Tim Hampshire is a really gifted musician, singer and songwriter. Keep Your Chin Up is a great showcase of the man’s talent. He's a man who really should be household name in the singer-songwriter world, rather than all the bland song-by-numbers types that currently take up space in the genre. If you're into your acoustic tunes then you need to check Tim out.

Stream and download Keep Your Chin Up here: https://timhampshire.bandcamp.com/

Like Tim Hampshire here: http://facebook.com/TimHampshireMusic

This review was written by Colin Clark.