Tom McRae: Tom McRae : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

This debut by a twenty-eight-year-old Englishman is a movingly executed pop war against clichŽ. It boasts erudite songs yet avoids the usual singer-songwriter manner of "interesting" lyrics or streaming confession. The arrangements, which add fierce teeth to McRae's dusty melodies and the slightly high tenor in which he delivers them, use electric guitars without descending into inappropriate riffing, and the strings eschew routine symphonic bloom. The writing combines off-kilter hummability and slanted narratives on politics, violence and sex. Songs such as "End of the World News (Dose Me Up)" and "Hidden Camera Show" happily act like freshly imagined pop tunes; others, such as "A & B Song," go at things more indirectly but with similar force. The result is dead-serious, and devastating.

JAMES HUNTER
(RS 889 - February 14, 2002)