(4AD)
Focus is an important thing. Countless albums suck because they lack focus, and jump wildly from ballads to rockers with abandon instead of sticking to a coherent theme or sound. It's possible to pull it off, of course, but it tends to be much more of a balancing act, and takes quite the accomplished musician to think they've got what it takes. The musician with knowledge keeps his concepts straight'Beck wisely decided to separate introspection from bootknockin' by making Mutations and Midnite Vultures separate albums. Anyone who feels like hearing that it's nobody's fault but their own may well have already defied all manner of sexx laws, and doesn't want to hear any more about them.
Neil Halstead is not really one for bootknockin,' but he's got the brooding down pat, after a decade of fronting moody shoe-gazing bands Slowdive and Mojave 3. His solo sound is no great departure, but to be fair, he's not treading water either. At times, Sleeping On Roads is more direct and positive than Halstead ever indicated he could get.
Driven by a quick drum shuffle, the album's opener, \Seasons,"" conveys a newfound optimism, with a chorus of ""No time for feeling old/No time for feeling blue/No time for wasting what we know."" This is remarkably sanguine for a man who once wrote that ""all my days seem dark and life seems cruel,"" a sentiment that pretty much defined Mojave 3. And it's not just ""Seasons,"" either; ""Driving With Bert"" and ""See You On the Rooftops"" follow the same formula, although the latter dissolves into three minutes of the feedback and ""Oohoos."" True, it's the most delicate feedback you're likely to hear but, making up more than half of the song, it begs for the ""skip"" button.
The real highlights of Sleeping On Roads, though, are the slow, gentle ballads, which make up six of the nine tracks. Halstead's blessed with a cooing, heavily Nick Drake-laced voice that's just beautiful, for lack of a less specific term, and accompanied by an acoustic guitar, he's at his best here, especially on ""Hi-Lo and Inbetween.""
The liner notes don't include lyrics, and it's far easier and more beneficial to enjoy the sound of Halstead's voice rather than pay too much attention to what's being said. To his credit, he has an uncanny ability to make the clich?? come across as less trite; it wasn't until well into the tenth listening or so that I realized ""Hi-Lo"" contained the sentiment ""Send in reinforcements/There's too much here for me to love,"" which is just a little too heavy on the open-mic bullshit than I care for. But it's to his credit that I didn't notice.
Innovation is not Neil Halstead's strong suit, but then again, neither is it the Strokes,' and there's plenty of bands out there just dying to blow your mind if you'll let them (Unwound). Instead of overreaching, Halstead has let his sound subtly mature, and the result is a skillful and highly listenable disc, one that accomplishes everything it sets out to do almost perfectly.
