This CD comes with a wonderfully minimal press release that fits onto a business card!! So if my background info is a little sketchy that's why, but it's good that the artist sent me the links for his Myspace page and also his fax number!!
Yes, this is an artist who wants to be told about a review by fax and that's something that doesn't happen often thee days. But then they are an Australian roots band so I guess if you come from somewhere called Leichhardt (sorry, where?) you might not be totally up to date.
The opener sounds like an update of an early Bob Dylan song and is not at all bad; in fact it's a good catchy suburban blues song. Federal Highway Blues is a nice mandolin-led slow blues for someone fighting, erm, the Federal Highway blues. It's nice, but nothing makes it stand out.
Dark Side Of The Road sounds like mid 70's Bob Dylan but with some nice strings attached and a good laid back feel to it. His Own Titanic has a real back porch down-home feel to it. This os a bit of a dark tune but not too dark. Please Tell The DJ is another Dylan-esque number and if I was more of a Dylanologist than I am I would tell you the tune he's nicked as it is fairly obvious. So don't blame the DJ this time.
Stranger features some decent lyrics about a life gone wrong from a young age over some very restrained picking. Home goes back to ripping off Bobby Dylan which is no bad thing when it's done well but it also means over the course of an album I start to wonder if Mark Lucas has any original ideas. Even the bit that steals a part from Michael Rowed The Boat To Shore just seems too obvious.
Small Town seems to rework the opening Little Town Blues and it's the sort of song that could have been recorded by hundreds of nondescript Nashville-style country acts at any point in the last 40 years. It just needs something to make it stand out a bit more as no matter how well played and produced this album is it is still rather homogeneous.
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The thing that makes Rider stand out is the flute that sounds like it could have been on a 70's funk record but stripped of all the funk and plonked in the middle of another Dylan-esque tune, but for all that it's not bad. Yes just what we need is another song about the Borderline, and this is by no means the most memorable song with this title but at least has some good lyrics about the plight of boat people and other refugees trying to get to a safer or better place than home. It's topical if nothing else.
The album closes with Metaphor Song: a nice sparse acoustic guitar-picked ballad that then adds some oompah tuba to lift it a bit. At least this sounds different to the rest of the album.
If you're looking for the next Australian-born Bob Dylan this album is for you. It's not bad and even occasionally inspired, but hardly original.
Mark Lucas Myspace page
Mark Lucas online
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