Joshua Radin
We Were Here
Sony BMG Music Entertainment
Two out of five stars
This Joshua Radin guy is all right, but I think I liked him better when he was called Elliot Smith.
Oh wait. Elliot Smith is dead.
Then that must make Radin a grave-robbing hack.
Seriously, this guy sounds so much like Elliot Smith, it’s kind of ridiculous. Right down to the I’m-so-depressed-I-can-barely-sing voice and the echoed vocal tracks to give an extra boost of “Gosh, I’m sad.”
But at least Elliot Smith was authentic.
He had all kinds of problems with drug addiction and depression and his lyrics seemed to really come from his aching guts. The guy committed suicide by stabbing himself in the heart, for crap’s sake (random music trivia: Did you know Smith’s last show before he died was right here at the U’s Redfest in 2003? I bet you didn’t. Or maybe you did. I don’t care).
Suffice it to say, the dude was pretty bummed-out.
This Radin meathead, on the other hand, just isn’t believable as the tragic acoustic guitar hero.
The music itself isn’t too bad-in fact it’s actually quite pretty, what with the cellos, piano and accompanying female vocalist-but it just doesn’t compensate for lyrics that come off as totally contrived. It seems Radin is singing less about his personal experience and more about what he thinks he’s supposed to experience.
There were even points at which it seemed as if he stuck a word in for no other reason than it had the right number of syllables and (sort of) rhymed. That said, Radin falls far short of following the poetic tradition of Smith, Nick Drake and Simon and Garfunkel, toward which he’s obviously striving.
In the end, Radin would do well to simply follow the cardinal rule of music: Write what you know-especially if you’re a sneak-thieving, Elliot-imitating, ass-monkey bastard.
