Singer-songwriters, eh. As if it wasn’t hard enough to tell some of them apart, they’ve begun using the same names now too, which is one inventive way to invigorate record sales we suppose. In what could provide problems similar to those experienced by casual followers of Ryan and Bryan Adams, Damien and Jonathan Rice are bound to momentarily suffer/benefit either from mistaken identity or the presumption that they’re blood relatives. Which they’re not, metaphorically or actually. They do co-exist under the same maudlin-blue sky, but they’re each very much rooted in their own countries of origin. At its most basic this is a folk album, informed by mainstream American country traditions through the years (from Dylan through to Wilco). At its most complex it is a string soaked exploration of higher ground in the same desert scene.
And it’s a capable collection of emphatically delivered emotions, but almost inevitably it all too often falls onto the central reservation between those two posts. It’s fashioned using the same mid-90s alt-production muscle familiar to anyone who’s ever heard Alanis Morrisette’s ‘Jagged Little Pill’. And can there be anyone born before 1996 who has not? But while that gives surgically-enhanced teeth to the bristling instrumental bed on which he lies his emotional musing, coupled with his bristling, tepid vocal tones it sadly reminds us more often than not of the, ahem, Counting chuffin’ Crows.
But in-between these standard sounding moments (‘Kiss Me Goodbye’, ‘So Sweet’, ‘Leave The Light On’) there are tracks like ‘Stay At Home’, a beautiful spiked punch of a summer song with children’s choir sounding kind of like Willy Mason with bling, ‘Behind The Frontlines’ evoking touring partners REM at their most stripped back and ‘My Mother’s Son’ which is Bond theme extravagant and really quite engaging to boot. There is no doubting that this collection will earn the man followers and give his Christian name equal billing with his family title, but on this showing alone he’s not going to become part of any lineage, merely supplement it.