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Review: 'HOEKSTRA, DOUG'
'The Day Deserved'   

-  Label: 'Drop Autumn Records'
-  Genre: 'Indie' -  Release Date: '30th April 2021'-  Catalogue No: 'DRA1104'

Our Rating:
Liner notes don’t call this a concept album in so many words but ambitiously identifies it as “a record intended to be a marker of the times.”

The Nashville-based artist’s detached, subdued, and semi-spoken delivery reminds me of Howe Gelb and, like the Giant Sand frontman, there’s a literate tone to the songs. Hoeskstra has also published several collections of fiction and each of the ten songs come with a complete back story as if they were protagonists of a novel.

Everything is so carefully considered that any hints of up tempo pop or spontaneity are tempered by the wordy lyrics and a meticulous attention to detail. Even straightforward lines like “I’m here for you baby” (in Grace) are immediately undermined by the reflection that ”it’s a complicated world.”

Hoeksta is certainly not interested in penning standard folk-pop songs with catchy hooks. Instead, the tunes are largely character studies with arrangements that draw upon a range of genres such as folk, soul, R’n’B, jazz and reggae. Non rock instrumentation includes cello, violin, sax, and son Jude on clarinet.

The style is exemplified in the opening two tracks: Seaside Town is the tale of a disenfranchised artist who decides to join the ranks of missing persons on her own terms; the 8 minute Higher Ground is a moody slow burn of a tune told from the viewpoint of an elderly man seeing his homeland disappear from “up above the clouds.”.

There are some lighter touches such as in Keeper Of The Word in which we find our hero flirting with a nerdy looking girl in a bookstore. But there are missteps too, notably in the ill-conceived ”funky noir …..power groove” of Gandy Dancer in which Hoeskska duets with Hannah Fairlight

In the slow melancholia of the closing song a man manually updates the scoreboard of a baseball match. He is on the Outside Looking In and, much as Doug Hoeksta the song writer does. he exists as an observer “on the edges of the crowd.”.

This detachment borders on the disengaged and becomes a problem in the track Unseen Undetected which compares the starkly opposing perspectives of immigrants and white supremacists. Undoubtedly, the singer’s sympathies lie with the former but although the small mindedness of the racists is noted, you can’t help thinking that they get off too lightly.

Certainly the album as a whole reflects the state of limbo the world is in right now, but the rambling and soporific tone offers too few glimpses of ways out of the general malaise.   

Doug Hoekstra’s website
  author: Martin Raybould

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HOEKSTRA, DOUG - The Day Deserved