Pat Monahan: Last Of Seven : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

If you’re not a Train fan, this solo album by Pat Monahan, the band’s lead singer, will strike you as an embellishment on something that seemed excessive in the first place. As a singer, Monahan has one setting -- over the top -- and his passion is often indistinguishable from self-involvement. For those reasons, listening to Last of Seven (Monahan is the youngest of seven children) straight through can be wearying. But, as with Train, many of these fourteen songs stand up well on their own -- starting with the single “Her Eyes,” which tosses off a telling line about a girlfriend: “She loved Michael Jackson up until he made Bad.” Brandi Carlile’s soulful duet on “Pirate on the Run” relaxes Monahan for nearly three full minutes, a welcome respite. Last of Seven, then, amounts to somewhat less than the sum of its individual songs. In the era of downloads, Monahan could have done far worse.