'I'm better off alone'

Hooray! Puervolume gave me a male singer/songwriter today which is nice because this blog is rather full of girls. Nothing wrong with that, it's just nice to see guys pulling their weight in contributing to todays music scene. And this is an interesting one, so belt up and enjoy the ride.

A BEAUTIFUL SILENCE

So this is one man who sings and plays guitar, drums and piano on all his records. I like to think sometimes he does it all at the same time, but I'm not overly sure that's true =( 
So what he has left out of his description (like a couple of artists in this blog actually) is the electric elements he slips into his music. Nothing big or fancy but it does generally work with his tracks. That is except for 'Beatiful Girl' where the electric really is  bit too loud over the rest of the track but we can let that slide. Ish.


So sound wise i'd give this guy a place somewhere between The Fray and, i dunno, Jimmy Eat World? While predominantly acoustic, and while he does describe himself as 'Pop' there's a slight hint of Americanised punk in what he's playing. Which is...dissapointing, if i'm honest. The first track of the playlist introduces this guy really well. You've got the relatively simple electro over some nice guitar and pretty strong lyrics. Yet you can tell from the guy's voice where i got the whole Jimmy Eat World comparison. This track also gives us the idea that this guy is clever. Rather than simple changing key or melody for the chorus and the bridge he actually changes his strumming pattern, the drum pattern, and even the tempo. I really enjoy little quirks like that so i get a good first impression of this guy.
Like i said before though too soon he becomes a bit too punky, but while also keeping his acoustic guitars and electric elements to his songs. Which really results in something a little bit odd. Oh and when i say 'Punk' i emphasise those inverted commas, because this is a classic case of aspirational punk that bands like Greenday come out with which really doesn't make the grade. We could alo call it 'Rock' since that's another label he gives himself, but that would be even more ridiculous.


I'm pretty sure that the acoustic elements of these songs, and the electrics really work well; it's like a clashing of opposite personalities. But when put with the vocals, something is lost. It's kind of like a musical triangle. You have these three main elements of Acoustic, Electric and Vocal and i think if you took any of those three away, the remaining two would work pretty well together. But together there's just something about the resulting sound that doesn't quite work. And that's rather dissapointing because i definately see some great stuff in his music, i just think he's put it all together wrong. 
Maybe that's what you get when you're a one man band - you want to include everything you know how to do in the music, regardless of how the finished product actually sounds.