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Ben Somer is a gifted songwriter, a silver-tongued devil who shares his tales of love and faith with soulful charm and witty despair. Although his songs have various angles and attitudes, storytelling is always their essence and their aim -- particularly on The Last One, Ben's new sophomore release. As cohesive as the legendary LPs of the seventies, the shape of this album was as important to him as the sound. It is appropriate then that The Last One has the feel of live playing: intricate but not over-produced, it is a refreshingly human sounding album.

The Last One is a real departure from the 23 year old's previous recordings, which were self-produced in his own basement studio. This one came together in Toronto's Rogue studio with Les Cooper (the award-winning producer of Jill Barber and Meaghan Smith), where a who's-who cast of Canadian musicians invigorated the sessions, bringing new life to Somer's folk ballads. The new album is distinguished by its pithier themes. There are songs of carnal conflict, but these love songs have been stripped of their sugarcoating and infused with a hearty dose truthfulness. Candor and sincerity are as important to his sound as compressions and rarefactions. His songs are soaked with whiskey, women and war, and often allude to ambiguous signs of the divine. "Caught in the Fire" asks spiritual questions without presuming to give any answers: "there's been faith and there's been truth, but they were both not truly right". One of those conflicting truths is "home", another recurring theme. It was the title of Ben's first album and it appears in The Last One as a source of beauty as well as heartbreak. It is also the source of his character. Ben might have been born in Dundas, Ontario, but he was raised at the hockey rink, in the woods of the Haliburton highlands and on the pages of John Irving. He's been influenced as much by the cry of a lone loon as the cough of a drunken poet.