Rating: 5/5
Review:
Very impressive
This is the first Milk Carton Kids album I have heard, and I am very impressed. It is a lovely album of songs sung in duo close-harmony and accompanied by some fine acoustic guitar work. It has a bit of a feel of Simon and Garfunkel about it, but other influences are evident, too. The opening song, Hope of a Lifetime, brought me up short on just its second line as I heard Graham Nash's top line on Teach Your Children exactly reproduced for a bar or two. Honey, Honey is a rocking bluegrass number very reminiscent of Peter, Paul and Mary, and the spirit of the Everly Brothers hovers close by in quite a few places throughout the album...and so on.
Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan sing beautifully together and their guitars sound just great. They are plainly very good guitarists - there is some terrific virtuoso stuff on Heaven, for example - but they also have the musical sense to keep it relatively simple most of the time, which is entirely appropriate to the material.
The songs themselves are a varied and thoroughly enjoyable mixture of the tender, the soulful and the joyously vigorous. I really like them, and some - the title track, for instance - have real lyrical substance. Whether these songs have the noble bone structure to give them real enduring beauty will only be clear with time. I suspect they may have it and I will be surprised if this album ever fades to become just a pretty period-piece. I think it's something rather special and recommend it warmly.
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