releasing an album with this title in the summer of the year 2007 is asking for trouble really isn’t it.

luckily the music is rather calm and mellow, that any rising of blood will be quickly counteracted by the soulful electronic charms that glenn gregory (yes that one), and his cohort keith lowndes (ex-abc bloke by all accounts) have put together for this fourth album. to quickly cut to the chase, the music is consistently beautiful and very easy on the ear, but rooted in the world of warm synthetic music, as opposed to the cold hearted set to stun electro variety that gets most of the attention these days.

while glenn takes up the vocal duties on a couple of tracks, most of the album is lead by various female vocals (briony greenhill, kim richey, kerry shaw, elsie wooley and lindsay crisp) making for what could be a mess of an album.

thankfully the whole issue is levelled out, and there is not really that much variety in the various vocal contributors making the 11 tracks flow in a very cohesive form.

so with that in mind, why have honeyroot opened the album with a sky reaching epic instrumental called goodbye?

surely that would have made for a perfect album closer - i suspect that these well established pop stars still like to stir things up a little. 

one thing is certain, its quite a dramatic opener that’s for sure, climatic strings, guitars and all manner of wonderfully produced layers making them probably play the ace in the pack far too early as rarely does the album get better than this.

with such track names as the aforementioned goodbye, along with, drifter, waves, freeway, and the stars there feels to be a kind of linking chain between tracks here. one of wanting to escape, and should the listener ever have the same need to break away, then this could be a very suitable soundtrack to any float away sessions, what with its old school trip hop stylings of nobody loves you (the way i do) (a track title that even references portishead !), sequencer electro overload of heavy drops, the reggae pop skank of where i belong, to the ambience of drifter that totally stops you in your track with the delicate twanged up guitars, and soft focus groove giving this listener a certain joy zipper type of buzz, and thats always going to win a few bonus points in this part of the world.

of course, this is not an album that is going to break down the definitions of originality, nor will it get the blogsphere rattling in ecstasy, but given the chance, it could make a lot of zero 7, or air fans very happy and possibly even bring a ray of welcome sunlight into peoples homes via their stereo system, and sometimes when the head and nerves are a little shredded, that’s all that you really want from an album.

 

more detail : here