Redemption's Son
3 Stars
Joseph Arthur is one cool customer -- almost too cool.
The little-known, critically acclaimed songsmith makes a studio-savvy brand of melancholic pop. Overstuffed with textures and synthesizers, each beeping and blipping soundscape is more icily detached and slickly postmodern than the next.
The sound of Arthur's solid sophomore album Redemption's Son is nothing short of stunning -- each song is a thickly layered, electronic epic of emotion -- but it isn't always enough. The production is often too cold and too distant for the yearning and longing in the songs. Sometimes the studio effects are too self-aware, too hip and contemporary for their own good.
The result is something like Beck's classic Odelay on morphine -- polished cool and dreamily melodic. Some songs are bathed in gentle mechanical ambience, accompanied by Arthur's hushed speak-singing drawl or angel-voiced falsetto. They are wounded songs, songs about confused love and alienation -- emotionally and quite literally.
"I think aliens abducted me," he croons in the superb "I Would Rather Hide." There's a painful, Neil Young sadness to the lovely "Innocent World," and quiet, apprehensive love abounds in songs like "Honey and the Moon."