Music Steak

With today’s mass of 3rd wave emo bands such as Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance composing the popular rock scene it’s easy to forget that acoustic rock stylings of singer songwriters such as Heather Nova were writing thoughtful and sensitive music while the members of such bands were still at high school (although some of them probably still are).

Bill Madden is one of these people. It’s rare that something without a driving rock beat makes it onto my playlist but I think this album may be one of the rare exceptions. If you want an idea of the sound think Michelle Branch’s Broken Bracelet album, Heather Nova and to a lesser extent Sheryl Crow though influence has been pulled from all over. As “Friend” began playing I had to remind myself I wasn’t listening to R.E.M.

This is followed by “Gone” which features a hint of The Smashing Pumpkins. And so it should - Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin features on the track.

The album offers an interesting mix, most of the tracks manage to have a twist on them which creates a different type of sound without playing around with the core style.

All in all it’s a well written and well put together album. It has it’s up points (most notably “Gone”) and it’s down points (some of the tracks are too slow moving) which averages out to be a soulful album that still has enough bass to cause my sub woofer to shake my floorboards as much as most of my rock collection can.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.