Labels: Reprise – WEA
Review by: Ian Scanlon
Ooh, Reprise. Home of Sinatra and Neil Young, a label not averse to throwing cash away, and boy oh boy, does it sound like they threw it at this album… the opening track is opulence itself… swoony strings and a bit of light moaning, and then this breathy div starts singing over the top, like a cut rate Tim Buckley. Ho hum, this lad thanks Conor Oberst, and Rilo Kiley on his inlay, and this record is pretty much a massively polished version of what alot of the bands on Oberst’s label do. It should be noted that I wouldn’t piss on most of those acts if they were on fire, but I digress… Don’t get me wrong some of it I wouldn’t turn off if it came on the radio, although the fake lo fi bluegrass of “put me in your holy war” made me want to kill the guy, not least because it was probably recorded inside an enormous gold and velour box and then put through the biggest computer in the world to make it sound like it was done on a ghetto blaster. It’s pretty evenly split between songs with meaningful acoustic fingerpicking and some that have big distorted ROCK guitars and DRUMS. One song “salvation day” I swear is actually a song by that band Doves, but then i am getting old and all this new music sounds the same to me. I have a terrible feeling that this bastardised version of the indie rock that I soundtracked my youth with has now become “adult alternative”. This stuff is Chris Rea for people who went to see Buffalo Tom in 1993, I need to go and lie down and think carefully about what my demographic is doing to the world.