Jennifer Crook - Carnforth Station

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Fine performances but weak material

Following correspondence with another listener I have listened again to this album and although I still have the same reservations about the material, I think there's enough good stuff on it to round 3.5 stars up to 4. I have left my original review below and stand by much of what I said, but the instrumental passage which closes Apples and the last two two tracks especially are genuinely good, so a four-star rating seems more appropriate.

Original review:
I took a random punt on this album because it looked like the sort of thing I enjoy and I liked the sound of the samples here. Sadly, I found it rather disappointing.

The performances and production are excellent. Jennifer Crook is a very talented musician and she has great support from her small band. She's also a good singer with a very nice voice, so the overall sound of the album is very sweet. However, I found the songs themselves rather weak, I'm afraid.

There are some quite good songs here - I like the opener Long Drive Back Home From Love, for example - but most are pretty ordinary. There's little in the way of original or interesting melody and harmony here, and much of the album sounds rather derivative, even familiar. The tune of The Net, for example, sounds very, very like Leonard Cohen's Suzanne in places and I was constantly finding that I recognised phrases of melody from other songs.

Many of the lyrics aren't that good either, I'm afraid. There is some decent stuff in places, but this from Angel In Disguise rather typified the standard for me:
"What about the lady who was waiting at the station?
She said to me that maybe I would reach my destination;
The only thing she said was that you must know where you're going
And as she turned around I thought there is no way of knowing."

It's not dreadful, but it's pretty banal really and reminded me of the sort of rather facile lyrics a lot of us teenagers with guitars wrote in the early 70s. Even Black Fly, which I found musically lovely and evocative, is let down by weak lyrics.

I'm sorry to be critical of such a well performed and produced album, but in the end fine performances and production can't make up for weak material, and too much of the material here is pretty weak. I would like to hear Jennifer Crook and her trio performing better songs because they are very good, but I'm afraid I can't really recommend this album.