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Rating: If only a simple, moderate, delightful, and intimate Blues, tinged with Pop, not particularly sugary, subtly ambered with dreamy and enjoyable Rock, could grant us the invigorating and restorative salvation from the daily, whether small or large, painful tribulations that sometimes more or less consciously overwhelm our seemingly senseless and earthly vicissitudes.
Moreover, it would be unkind to ask for a miracle of such nature from the gentle Mark, an educated and refined vocalist known in the past for having accompanied in His artistic and human journeys, the mellifluous Jayhawks. It arrives at the close of last year, after almost three years of silence during which His personal ordeals, both sentimental and of merely artistic concatenated nature, must have taken their appropriate and unbearable toll, to His new and overall successful solo work, in which He is appreciably assisted, in three of the eleven tracks, by His former comrade-in-arms Mr. Gary Louris.
Narrow, faint, and often tender sketches - sporadically the songs exceed three minutes - in which the acoustic and the faint but assured tone of Our Hero reign supremely: Mark seems to lay himself completely bare - musically and textually - before those who lend an ear; starting from the pale and softly graceful yet engaging opening track (“My Carol”), moving through the subtle Country-like irony of the charming “Winter Song” and the elegiac tenderness found in “Sandy Danny”. Monsieur Olson, supported by His faintly melancholic and graceful west-coast company, offers posterity a generous half-hour of increasingly delightful yet moderately enchanting and restorative listening: if it's not a miracle, it's pretty close.
Thanks for thinking of us, Dear Mark.
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