Fever Tree - Creation (25/9/19)

My original plan was to just do one album each night (unless the first one was somehow unsatisfying), but tonight's choice of Tarkus was based on cool cover art for an album i've never heard before, and since there's 2 rum and coke's for every can i'm more than happy to say this is an awesome cover for a band i never even knew existed (which for me is saying something). I hope i'm not disappointed...

... and the answer is "yes and no." The band is quite good and i want to hear their other 3 albums, but this album shows some definite disadvantages holding them back.

In no particular order:
- They can't seem to decide if they are pop-folk or blues-rock, which wouldn't be bad if they were recognizably the same band in both genres.

- the band is primarily a front for the producers/songwriters, and you can tell. There's a little something that just comes across as manufactured in every track. Like, a lyric that doesn't sound right, or a clearly contrived string arrangement. It genuinely sounds like Scott and Vivian Holtzman were workhorsedly imitating a particular band or song that was already popular, but they weren't creative enough to really do it right.

- there's no stylistic coherence to this album at all. One moment they sound like real contemporary rockers steppenwolf or iron butterfly (both bands we'll hear a lot in the near future, wink), the next they are singing a faux Neil Diamond ballad, then there's spanish guitar and trumpet, and tempo/meter shifts for no musically relevant reason.

So, to recap, if i just randomly picked any track from this album i'd say "that's really interesting," but when you smash them all together i think "is this a compilation album of the singer's session work?"

Oh well, it's certainly not the first time a cool cover left me feeling underwhelmed, but i definitely wouldn't call any particular track terrible. We'll give it a good solid "meh." At the very least, i had a lot to say about it, and that should count for something ;)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSnEc0eT1ST4r2gfwpCDSlW23NPciQDdD

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