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| (2014) Believe |
Review Summery: Polished to the point that is seems to have been lost in the blizzard, failing to make any emotional connection.
I guess that I see the appeal of James Vincent McMorrow after the sleeper success of his 2011 cover of Steve Winwood's 'Higher Love'. His falsetto is of an angelic frost-bitten quality; biting with a beautiful chill. On paper it is appealing, following in the footsteps of Bon Iver's Justin Vernon in producing music of mountain-side solitude. Comparisons are inevitable, and quite unfortunate. McMorrow, for all his pitch-perfection, leavings a feeling that there is something lacking that Vernon holds in spades. The purity and depth of emotion that resonates throughout the music of Bon Iver is here polished away. While Vernon pours forth his heart, McMorrow seems too focused on the music itself and therefore seems to forget why he has wrote the song in the first place. It is polished; it is pitch-perfect but it feels over-thought and over-produced. While Vernon feels like an man caught in a blizzard, distraught; McMorrow feels like he is the blizzard itself, a beautiful force of nature but in the end simply leaving you a bit cold.
'Post Tropical' should be a masterpiece, but it sadly just doesn't feel the sum of all its parts. It leaves me wanting more, but what's worse is it leaves me wanting something I know I will not find here. I want to be elsewhere. For me, personally, it fails to connect on an emotional level and slightly confounds in how a voice and arrangement so beautiful on paper can feel so bland.
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