Turn on that stereo and get out those tissues, Rocky Votolato has returned to tell us more tales about loneliness, longing, and whiskey. You know, the good things in life.
Following off the success of his previous album Makers, Votolato’s been on the road a fair bit, a medium where he seems to have gathered a great deal of the material for this album, and that’s what this album is: a traveling album; Makers on-the-go, if you will. But it also comes equipped with a whole lot more production than Makers had, a quality which ends up being the album’s downfall.
Most songs consist of the typical somber acoustic numbers that defined Makers, but now with drums on almost every track, an accompanying electric guitar with fills that just seem wedged in and out of place, and a mediocre harmonica playing with way too much of the spotlight.
The album comes out to a seeimingly-nice start with “Lilly White,” attempting to persuade the listener that this album will be different than makers. A song about a girl he used to be with who is no longer there (a completely novel route for Rocky), “Lilly White” offers the same sad story, just a little trumped up. The only real stand out track on the album lies in “Before You Were Born,” creating some imagery to the whole on-the-road thing (I've seen an ending worth waiting for / under blankets of maps to keep us warm), and maybe the only one where the drums actually seem appropriate. For the rest of the album, it just feels like he’s writing the same old songs as before but wanted to put as much as instrumentation as possible to cover that up.
The key to Makers’ success lied in the intimate and open nature of the songs. With The Brag and Cuss, it just seems that Rocky’s trying to hide that with a more bombastic approach, but in terms just results in an album that fizzles out into pleasant, but ultimately uninteresting folk-pop.
|