His press-release stresses that he’s 20 years old. In a sense, that says it all but it’s worth digging a bit deeper. The songs are super-slickly produced, there’s some good guitar slashing here and there, but lyrics like “you’re trying too hard, you won’t get very far, boy” sum up the endeavour more neatly than any review. Lyrical banality rules the day: “fish upon a hook” is a metaphor that arises in the opener ‘Danse Macabre”’. ‘Teetotal’ is dreary rubbish about drinking and not wanting to drink. The closer, ‘Going Home’ teeters close to being a good song with its youthful winsomeness, it wouldn’t sound half bad coming out of someone like Meatloaf, but in the age of Youtube it only evokes the kind of thing you hope James Blunt will be singing in Hell some day.
