Marker Starling Trust An Amateur Vinyl

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it," the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, "is to love who- ever is around to be loved." It's a sentiment shared by the latest album from Toronto troubadour Chris A Cummings, whose eighth full length as Marker Starling captures in crystalline pop a time in his life full of birth, death, life, loss, endings and renewal. Reeling from the death of a close friend and collab- orator, two years after the birth of his first child, Trust An Amateur asks questions about mortality, searching for their answers on tracks led by gorgeous drifts of airy Wurlitzer keyboard calm. The result is an album that's mini- malist in sound, but profound in message: an expert songwrit- er pushing his poetry to a brave new existential brink.