“The first thing you notice about “To Whom It May Concern,” the new album from longtime Austin singer-songwriter and bandleader Ray Prim, is just how wide-open his music is. Like much of the best music our city has produced over the decades, it’s nearly impossible to pin down as one genre or style. With multiple vocalists and two violinists carrying the melodies and a solid rhythm section locking down the groove, Prim and his six-piece backing crew create songs that carry accents of soul, rock, R&B, pop, folk, jazz and more. But ultimately this music stands apart from all those genres. That’s exactly what Prim wanted when he shifted gears about a decade ago, after many years of working hard to make it big with the band 7 Stones. From the mid-’90s to 2004, that band recorded three albums and toured extensively, playing riff-based hard rock that never quite broke through to a larger audience.”

“Rediscovering his lyrical center in a calmer acoustic setting – being honestly heard without rock guitar – set forth another path toward personal redemption. In this singer-songwriter iteration, mounds of material made each succeeding project an improvement over the previous one, diverse sounds and voices piling atop one another. While 2017’s affirming To Whom It May Concern signified a great leap forward, Unconditional evolves, refines, and crystallizes his rich, Bill Withers-esque amalgam of soul, pop, R&B.”

“the artist Prim has most reminded me of since I first saw him and his group a year ago is Alejandro Escovedo, the longtime Austin performer who moved to Dallas last year. That’s not to say their music is anything alike, really: Prim is his own artist, in the same way indie-rock great Spoon is different than 1980s local alt-rockers the Reivers who preceded them, and Gary Clark Jr. is more than simply a modern blues-rock version of Stevie Ray Vaughan.”