Album Review: James Morisson's Songs For You, Truths For Me

James Morrison - Songs for You, Truths for Me
Lately I have been picking up anything I can and giving it a listen. This is an exercise to sharpen my ears, broaden my musical experience and hone my ability to communicate about what I hear. Not all the music I listen to I am going to enjoy or respect.

When I looked this guy up on Wikipedia, I got a few choices to pick from. Interestingly, James Morrison the trumpet player from Australia was labelled as musician whereas the James Morrison responsible for this album was labelled as singer. I love the implication there.

The overall impression is that this guy should give up and let somebody else do it. I actually heard him on the radio a few weeks ago, and not knowing who I was listening to I thought Holy Shit is Simply Red still kicking along?. James Morrison appears to be Simply Red attempting to be Joe Cocker at times. His vocal huskiness he attributes to a bout of whooping cough when he was a baby. It would have impressed me far more to conjure up a tale of drinking addiction recovery, or stick a cigar in the guy's teeth for every photo shoot to explain it. I can see this album appealing to the cliched mid-fourties housewife who needs something to listen to while doing their digital scrapbooking - escaping from the teenage nightmares they have spawned and wish to have no more responsibility for.

Tracks of note on this album:
Track 1 - The Only Night
Firstly, the piano is far too defined in the mix. We have Late Show sound from bar one. The track tries to smack you in the face with full on brass/rhythm entry first off and almost succeeds. Funnily the vocal ad-libbing reminds me of a cross between Hanson and Joss Stone.
The chorus here is a disappointment after a nice brassy prechorus section. It builds through the prechorus section then all drops out to what seems like a completely different style - very straight in the rhythm with heavy and predictable vocal harmony. A fitting opening track for the album, showing potential laced with cliche and ultimately disappointment.

Track 6 - Nothing Ever Hurt Like you
The accompaniment has the potential here to be a nice down and dirty groove in the style of The Letter and some of the Tom Jones covers. It builds nicely but then leads straight to disappointment with an immediate lowering of volume in the bass as soon as the vocals enter. What does that do? It makes it feel like the balls have dropped out of the track.
The chorus features more driving rhythm in the drums - snare hits on every beat pushing it along, a direct juxtaposition to the laid back feel of the verse. Vocally, there is some backup harmonising happening. It's at a tasteful level, but still the choice of harmony is not fitting to this style at all.
Overall this track would fantastic live, with pumping bass, a kick-arse session band... and with Joe Cocker performing it instead.

Track 9 - If You Don't Wanna Love Me
Vocally, this is a pretty solid track. The melody is still pretty damn predictable. It's the rest that is letting it down.
The track starts out as a duet between electric guitar vocals - the guitar with a slightly dirty tone, heavy on the mids. Oh, potential! But there's not much imagination in the accompaniment. It's more powerful in the first chorus than the verse to match the step-up in the vocals, however there could be a lot more use of space overall to highlight the occasional fill.
Second verse - drums enter after a brief and extremely pitiful taste of strings (a warning of things to come...). The drums seem to be mixed too clean - they stand out as seperate from the rest of the band enough to bring on the impression of being a midi track.
Then some truly trite and unimaginative string arrangement for the second chorus onwards and it's game over. Forever relegate this track to ballroom dance shows trying keep up with the times by playing the music of somebody who isn't dead yet.

Track 10 - Fix the World Up For You
Ahhh, MERIT!!! Everything seems to fit well in this track. The instruments are well mixed, the vocal harmonies suit the style of the song. There's some wavering in the brass entries during the introduction, however rather than showing up as unprofessional it gives a human quality to the performance.
It's a classic pop soul piece, and well done for what it is.

Track 12 - Love is Hard
This track is one that would be far better live and acoustic. It has fallen victim a little to the temptation of multilayering in the studio. Just because you can have a shitload of layers doesn't mean that you should. A friend once said to me that if you can play a song with just acoustic and vocals, and still have it hold it's own, then it is truly a good song. This track can quite easily do that.
It starts off with a simple high-pitched guitar accompaniment that allows James' rough vocal quality to shine through. He has room to let loose in the chorus a little without his vocals being muddied by anything else that is going on.
It's sad that this track is relegated to last position on the album. It's of quality that I would like to see more of from this singer. Acoustic and vocal is much more suited to this man than a bad arrangement with a few brass instruments thrown in.

File Songs For You, Truths For Me to the left of Michael Buble and Harry Connick Jnr, and to the right of your Michael Bolton and Simply Red. Play when your mother comes to visit, and accompany with a mug of budget-label tea with too much milk in order to match the lack of complexity and predictability of this album.