Music Review: Indie Round-Up – Jacob Blazer, Charlie Parr, MSB Family Band

Jacob Blazer, I Am Jacob

Coming off a jam-band pedigree, Jacob Blazer heads in a contrasting, minimalist direction with his new EP. Backed by his band The Good People he's stripped everything down, "moving on down" as he insists in "Moving." The music is clear and relatively simple, the lyrics accessible in a way that's likely to appeal to youthful romantics and cynical adults alike.

This minimalist flavor extends to the song titles (all single words), and finds expression in a good-natured mix of smooth soulful pop, airy reggae, and bemused rap. There's a leftover flower-child aroma here and there – in the chord progression borrowed from "Lay Lady Lay," in the slow central number "Simple," and in the Woodstock-ish harmonies of "Allstar," in which rapped verses alternate with the vaguely trippy chorus "Sometimes you need an allstar/Sometimes you need a rubber soul." I think the closer, "Goodbye," is my favorite track by virtue of its catchiness and the perky attitude that bubbles up through the music in spite of lyrics about the end of a relationship. The whole EP carries a sense of harmonious uplift that really can put a smile on your face.

Charlie Parr, Barnswallow

You can depend on Charlie Parr for traditional-sounding blues and folk with lots of energy, assured musicianship, and minimal artsiness. Amazingly, Barnswallow is his eleventh studio album. It's got all the authentic rootsiness of Keep Your Hands on the Plow though less of the tasty gospel influence featured on that earlier disc. Maybe for that reason, maybe for some other, there's less beauty in the songwriting this time around, and a few of the folkier numbers get a bit monotonous. But the keening "Jesus is a Hobo" and the wry "Badger" might be worth the purchase price all by themselves; the plucky "Henry Goes to the Bank" wormed itself into my lizard brain too; and "True Friends" speaks truth: "True friends are hard to find/To get one you got to be one." True music isn't that easy to find nowadays either, but there's plenty of it here.

Article Author: Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Co-Executive Editor of Blogcritics and lead editor of the Culture section. As a writer he contributes most often to Culture, where he reviews NYC theater; he also covers interesting music releases and writes a semi-regular review round-up of independent albums. …

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