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In 2018, every album release has to have an angle, it seems. The unique selling proposition for Romantic Stories <\/i>is that Thompson wrote all of its songs ion a ukulele. A pink<\/i> one, in fact. Fascinating, no? Me neither.<\/p>\nIn 2018, every album release has to have an angle, it seems. The unique selling proposition for Romantic Stories <\/i>is that Thompson wrote all of its songs ion a ukulele. A pink<\/i> one, in fact. Fascinating, no? Me neither.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s ignore that and focus on the music itself, which is decidedly not played on a uke. \u201cA Thud\u201d is loping, midtempo rock\/pop, with hints of country and even zydeco. A catchy enough tune, it\u2019s marred by a tinny mix that\u2014unintentionally, I think\u2014makes the song sound as if it\u2019s coming out of an AM transistor radio.<\/p>\n
The rest of the album rocks a bit more and doesn\u2019t suffer from the first cut\u2019s production shortcomings. Thompson has a pleasant voice, and the guitar riffs around which his songs are built are sturdy ones. The drumming on the album is competent\u2014really, there\u2019s not a thing wrong with it\u2014but the feel is very stiff, as if it\u2019s played by either a machine or a session drummer who\u2019s solid and professional but unfamiliar with the material.<\/p>\n
The album improves as one digs into it, though. \u201cIn the Monk\u2019s Garden\u201d has subtle hints of southern rock. Thompson sometimes seems to write vocal melodies that push his capabilities to their limit, but there\u2019s nothing here to offend the ear. \u201cAnymore\u201d has an odd feel; it\u2019s difficult to sort out exactly what kind of a vibe the artist is going for here: it sounds a bit like \u201cTouch of Grey\u201d era Grateful Dead with a slightly clunky melody.<\/p>\n
But Thompson scores major points for his commitment to variety: too many albums are little more than a collection of multiple versions of the same basic musical idea. Romantic Stories<\/i> is quite varied.<\/p>\n
In fact, that\u2019s the album\u2019s overriding virtue. Even if one doesn\u2019t enjoy a given tune, further investigation is sure to turn up another very different one more to one\u2019s liking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 2018, every album release has to have an angle, it seems. The unique selling proposition for Romantic Stories is that Thompson wrote all of its songs ion a ukulele. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14758,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,51,65],"tags":[3467],"class_list":["post-14757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-release","category-pop","category-review","tag-marty-thompson","cat-49-id","cat-51-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14757"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14759,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14757\/revisions\/14759"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}