Fucking hell this is dreadful.  Really, annoyingly, frustratingly bad.  It starts out like the fucking Bee Gees, but fortunately ratchets it back from toe-curlingly awful to merely tediously mediocre pretty much immediately and then resolutely stays there for the rest of the album.

Even the name of the band (d’you get it – d’you see what they did there?) has a self-satisfied, complacent whiff to it, and generally this whole sorry enterprise smacks of the lazy, lifeless exercise in self-congratulation and mutual backslapping which this sort of super[sic]-group stuff can so easily be accused of.

I know that accusing artists of being lazy or self-satisfied is out of order because that really is projecting states of mind onto people that you generally don’t know well enough to be making that sort of statement about, but this album really does have that sort of air about it.  Four guys (Conor Oberst, Jim James from My Morning Jacket, M Ward and producer Mike Mogis), all of whom have ‘made it’ in the world of alternative music, all getting together in a great big alt-folk fucking circle jerk of doom.  So if this isn’t lazy or self-satisfied, which it might well not be, it certainly manages to sound conspicuously like it.

Basically, musically this just dips in and out of variations on the Americana template, is played in a smooth and competent manner, and seems almost like a lacklustre covers album – some harmony-laden pop, some West Coast rock ‘n’ roll, some acoustic balladry, although even that has too much added to it.  It’s just the absolute middle of the fucking road in pretty much every respect – the tunes are okay, the sound is kinda medium American folk rock, it’s not too heavy, not too sad, not too jaunty… nothing – it’s just fucking nothing.

I am not a big fan of Conor Oberst, although I think that may be related to only being familiar with his later work, but I think his voice is probably the closest I can find to a saving grace in this MOR shitfest.  On one or two songs his sad, sincere vocals lend just enough pathos to songs generally underserving of such validation to make a couple of the tracks listenable.

And that is pretty much it.  Fucking awful.

Monsters of Folk – Temazcal

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Monsters of Folk – Baby Boomer

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You know, I really don’t like M. Ward most of the time, but I’m enjoying this.  The first album of his I ever bought was End of Amnesia, which I utterly failed to love.  I tried again with Post War, and didn’t really succeed there either.  I know that sounds silly, but it really does feel like failure because indie kids seem so into M. Ward that I always sort of feel that the fault is mine, and it’s actually something of a relief to find myself liking this.  Phew.  I can hide behind my fringe and shuffle about in bars once more.

It’s another album which is, if you ask me, just a little longer than it needs to be.  I’ll confess that I do lose concentration a little bit by the end, but I don’t really mind that.  For the first half of the album it licks along at a good pace, bouncing through a bluesy sort of landscape, wandering occasionally into more mysterious territory, and occasionally relaxing into some nice, familar balladry.

It’s about a million miles from groundbreaking, but it has charm, warmth and no little charisma.  Maybe it’s the treatment of his voice.  Maybe it’s just his actual voice.  I don’t know, but this album shimmies along with much more pep than most other M.Ward stuff I’ve heard.  I’m not falling all over myself to praise it, but until I doze off somewhat during the last handful of songs, I am finding this really quite enjoyable.

M Ward – For Beginners

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M Ward – Stars of Leo

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