{"id":22315,"date":"2022-01-23T05:30:05","date_gmt":"2022-01-23T10:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=22315"},"modified":"2022-05-06T07:49:15","modified_gmt":"2022-05-06T11:49:15","slug":"album-review-david-brookings-mania-at-the-talent-showcase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/23\/album-review-david-brookings-mania-at-the-talent-showcase\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: David Brookings \u2013 Mania at the Talent Showcase"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A quick bit of context here, if you don\u2019t mind. I\u2019ve been a fan of Brookings\u2019 music for some years now, and have reviewed at least two of his albums (the 2016 release by David Brookings and the Average Lookings<\/i><\/a> and Scorpio Monologue<\/i><\/a>) as well as mentioning his work in the context of a number of Big Stir Singles<\/em> compilations. For some reason, I got it in my head that his latest \u2013 Mania at the Talent Show<\/i> \u2013 leaned in a twangy, Americana direction. For that reason (as long time readers of this online mag might expect) I was disinclined to be interested.<\/p>\n

A friend* suggested that I might have got my signals crossed, as it were, and encouraged me to give the album another listen. Heeding that advice, I fished the CD out of the dumpster (Kidding! Kidding!) and popped it into my player.<\/p>\n

Now, it\u2019s unfair to expect an artist to deliver the same thing album after album (unless their band is called Oasis), but it\u2019s reasonable to understand that when or if an artist stays far from their established style (see Richard X Heyman\u2019s Tiers<\/i><\/a> for a textbook example), many listeners may experience disappointment, even if the music is quite good.<\/p>\n

Mania<\/i> isn\u2019t a left turn of that magnitude. In fact it\u2019s largely consistent with Brookings\u2019 established aesthetic: finely crafted pop songs with an emphasis on melody and accessible arrangements. It\u2019s true that the opener \u201cHard Times\u201d doesn\u2019t rock hard, and that the second track, Keep it Real,\u201d serves up more in the way of twang than one might expect from Brookings. In fact, on second listen, I think it\u2019s that track that threw me off the course. Brookings affects a bit of a Southern accent, and the song\u2019s arrangement is filled with ukuleles (they sound a bit like mandolins), slide guitars that sound like pedal steel, and lyrics to (sort of) match.<\/p>\n

And tunes like \u201cOjai\u201d lean in a more acoustic direction than some of what we\u2019ve heard on past Brookings releases. But if one listens past those first few cuts, Mania at the Talent Show<\/em> delivers the kind of textures that won this listener over some several years ago. \u201cOne of Us is Crazy (The Other One is Me)\u201d might sport a title that suggests Today\u2019s Modern Country™, but the song itself is a breezy, catchy number.<\/p>\n

\u201cWords Come Back to Haunt You\u201d is a mid-tempo number with a heavy guitar lead at its center. And \u201cGet Off (My Mind)\u201d is wonderfully chiming pop that fits in well with the sounds of Brookings\u2019 earlier releases. In fact, if I were to offer a mild criticism (hey, that\u2019s kinda what I do<\/i>), I might have sequenced the album with \u201cGet Off\u201d as the opening track, and placed the (slightly) twangy tunes mid-album.<\/p>\n

\u201cWomen of L.A.\u201d is more winning pop-rock with a subtle Beach Boys flavor and clever, amusing lyrics. \u201cMagnolia\u201d has a SoCal vibe with hints of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; never a bad thing, that. \u201cKill Shot\u201d is Brookings at his best, with memorable melodies applied to really good songwriting and a careful (but not fussy) arrangement that serves the songs.<\/p>\n

The live (or faux-live) title track is fun. Hints of twang crop up again \u2013 especially in the sonorous lead guitar break \u2013 but they don\u2019t overwhelm. \u201cHide Your Crazy\u201d is a rare minor-key excursion with some fascinating funk-centric keyboard textures. It\u2019s a stylistic outlier on Mania<\/i>, but in a way that works. The album wraps with \u201cMystery of Time,\u201d a jangling bit of ear candy with some of the album\u2019s tastiest lead guitar sounds. It\u2019s easily among the album\u2019s strongest tracks.<\/p>\n

Verdict: On second listen, I will allow that Mania at the Talent Show<\/i> may not, strictly speaking, be an Americana album. That said, hints of the style do make themselves known in a few prominent places, and listeners\u2019 feelings about the record as a whole might be colored by that fact. Yet the qualities that have made David Brookings a musical force to be reckoned with are still very much at the center of his work.<\/p>\n

* full disclosure: the artist himself.<\/p>\n

UPDATE MAY 2022:<\/strong><\/span> Brookings is playing Americana festivals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A quick bit of context here, if you don\u2019t mind. I\u2019ve been a fan of Brookings\u2019 music for some years now, and have reviewed at least two of his albums […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22316,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,51,62,65],"tags":[2821],"class_list":["post-22315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-release","category-pop","category-rawk","category-review","tag-david-brookings","cat-49-id","cat-51-id","cat-62-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22315"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22921,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22315\/revisions\/22921"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}