Jarrod Dickenson
Album: The Lonesome Traveler
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.jarroddickenson.com

The Texan-born, now NYC (Brooklyn)-based singer-songwriter brings us a followup to his 2008 record Ashes On The Ground, with a new collection of self-penned rough-hewn chronicles of struggle, solitude and adventure much inspired by the writings of Steinbeck. These are modestly engineered, adhering to a likeable acoustic-cum-electric-country-roots template and not departing radically from that milieu.

Heard in isolation, each song has its own genial appeal, but there’s nothing really ear-grabbing or newly minted about Jarrod’s music; his thought-processes are familiar, his imagery and musical expression equally time-honoured. Occasional more enterprising instrumental settings compensate to some measure, e.g. on songs like I Remember June, as does the standard of musicianship (and, with folks of the calibre of Greg Leisz, Richard Dodd, Sebastian Aymanns, David Piltch and Jebin Bruni on board, well that’s none too surprising). But in the end, although this is a better-than-workmanlike singer-songwriter record, with nothing wrong with it, not in any sense clichéd and with much to commend it, there are nevertheless more distinctive examples around and in the end it proves nothing to overly shout about in spite of a certain old-fashioned crafted quality that characterises its finest moments and despite the intimate, well-worn, if at times slightly morose charm of Jarrod’s singing voice (a feature which I appreciated more as the album wore on, actually).

And I really loved the closing Seasons Change, written for one of the album’s overall dedicatees, Jarrod’s grandfather Homer.

David Kidman