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Hunt Sidway’s second LP is a veritable mushpot of styles and sound, with jazz elements, pop-rock melodies, and folkish rhythms interspersed throughout.  He’s made an effort at tying together so many various styles and aspects into one sound.

Unfortunately, some problems emerge in the very first track--a melody line that feels clunky, unbalanced production, mixing that doesn’t seem to mesh the various sounds together well--and persist through the rest of the record.  Only a couple tracks are outrightly bad, including the overly obvious attempt at creating moody atmosphere in the spoken lyrical-line filled “Forever Gray” and a couple tracks that fall into over-embellished vocal harmonization and jazz tones.  But the rest of the record is stuck on the launch pad by melodies and instrumentation that never really takes off, remaining merely so-so at best.  

He does make some creative attempts to express various themes, including liking an oncoming, speeding soon-to-be-derailed train to a love relationship gone awry.  But what hurts the record primarily is over-embellishment. There are too many moments where sounds come in that just don’t cohere well with the melodies.  It ends up jarring the listening experience rather than further layering and expressing it.  I think Hunt needs to be a bit more conservative in his song writing, boil everything down to express his true talents, and let everything flow from there.  For now, his music isn't cohesive enough to recommend.  But if he can smooth out his melodies and let what instrumentation that compliments them fall naturally into place, he’d be going somewhere good fast.

Jonathan Avants 5/19/05