Listen: Gambles – So I Cry Out

Gambles has the sort of picture perfect pedigree any acoustic singer-songwriter would kill for.

Road trips with dad chewing over Joni Mitchell, picking up a guitar and not stopping til he had over a hundred Cohen songs nailed down, mysterious love and more mysterious loss; it’s all there, and crucially it all feels not the least bit contrived.

Matthew Daniel Siskin makes music which reacts, feels, as well as persuading you to do the same with devastating potency. From ‘So I Cry Out’s tangled, near croaking vocal to its stuttering six-string strumming; this is music which bleeds authenticity in an age when little is as the plastic veneer suggests. The track was recorded in sudden, improvised bursts and by the time he sputters those final cutting bars, ‘so here we are, in the final stand, kids grown up, by the hardest of circumstance,’ you could easily mistake it for a long lost Dylan field recording.

Gambles’ debut LP Trust is out 30 September through his own GMBLS imprint on Secretly 
Canadian.