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The Daily Tar Heel

Icy Songsmith Struggles With Sentiment, Ghost

Joseph Arthur

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."

But that isn't to say that all of Redemption's Son is that subdued. Many songs drown under fierce beds of synthesizers and heavy sound effects, becoming something like pop of the apocalypse. Arthur can growl as well as he can gush, as in the angered "Permission," even if it doesn't complement him quite as well.

The one thing that Arthur connects with is his hollow spirituality. If there's a ghost in Arthur's machines, it's the Holy Ghost.

His search for a response from a higher power is like a chorus repeated through the album's entirety. "Dear Lord" might be the best prayer song ever written -- a rollicking, electronic Shaker revival, complete with gospel cooing and choir hand-clapping, a repentant rock pastiche. Arthur finds his music's soul, and it's in soul-searching.

He spends an awfully long time looking for it, too, as Redemption's Son checks in at an arduous 75 minutes. Brevity isn't one of Arthur's gifts, and several songs could easily be trimmed to make the album more manageable.

A long record is sometimes a sign of an artist's lack of faith in his material, as if he didn't trust that the songs were strong enough if not in a pack. That might be true of Redemption's Son, as a lot of Arthur's songs aren't always as impressive as the instrumentation. The melodies don't always live up to the promise and thrust of the production -- the Christmas tree not always as worthwhile as its ornaments. He seems more comfortable with a dial in his hand, not a pen.

And that might be fine by Arthur's standards. He might be too cool to care.

The Arts & Entertainment Editor can be reached at artsdesk@unc.edu.

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