Plumbiferous Media

Title Tracks is the solo project of John Davis, formed in 2008, a few years after the breakup of his ear­lier group, Q and Not U. With Title Tracks’ debut LP, Davis demon­strates expe­ri­ence gained from seven years with Q and Not U as well as his own cre­ativ­ity, com­bined to cre­ate a truly inter­est­ing musi­cal pres­ence which is uniquely his own. It Was Easy is a great debut, and though it suf­fers from cer­tain flaws, is on the whole a very enjoy­able album.

While Title Tracks does seem to have a soft spot for tracks that alter­nate between two mod­estly dif­fer­ent, yet still com­pletely con­nected sec­tions, tracks on It Was Easy are, per­haps ignor­ing struc­ture, impres­sively diverse. One would be hard pressed to find two even fairly sim­i­lar tracks on the album, given that tracks span the entire range from pure rock to funk to Tex-Mex and back, and tracks by no means stop at genre in order to achieve diver­sity. Through­out It Was Easy, Davis toys with mood, instru­men­ta­tion, and most of all, rhythm. Each instru­ment is given its chance to shine, and at least as impor­tantly, they sound amaz­ing when doing so.

It Was Easy is, bluntly, a won­der­fully designed album. Not only is it very, very diverse, but it still feels like one well con­nected album beneath all of its genre meld­ing and rel­a­tively sub­tle exper­i­men­ta­tion. Fur­ther­more, the record­ing qual­ity is truly excel­lent. It’s not incred­i­bly crisp and it doesn’t have a huge amount of depth, but it’s warm, and more than any­thing else, very, very nat­ural sound­ing. It might not have been the best for most other albums, but for the con­tent on It Was Easy it’s near perfect.

It’s obvi­ous from the first moment of It Was Easy that Davis’ time with Q and Not U (on which all three mem­bers shared vocal duties) has given him a good bit of expe­ri­ence as a vocal­ist, as he fits his voice expertly with the musi­cal direc­tion of the album - harsher and more “rock­ish” on “Every Lit­tle Bit Hurts,” while much softer on later track “Hello There.” Davis’ voice occa­sion­ally slips into a repet­i­tive style, espe­cially on (unsur­pris­ingly) the repet­i­tive parts of the album, such as cer­tain sec­tions of “Black Bub­blegum,” and is some­times accen­tu­ated (thank­fully infre­quently) by a regret­table falsetto. At the same time, how­ever, the well-crafted rhyth­mic style with which he accom­pa­nies the best tracks makes such weaker moments seem much less impor­tant by comparison.

Lyri­cally, It Was Easy is a bit of a mixed bag. On the best tracks, the lyrics range from benign to well-written. Lines such as “Piles of Paper“‘s “Don’t make me go there / I know what I’ll find / Another one just like you” work quite well, espe­cially with the energy Davis puts into them. On the other hand, how­ever, there are cer­tainly less well-written lines. Prob­a­bly the best exam­ple of this is the more than slightly inane, “Just keep chew­ing your black, black bub­ble gum / You’re still num­ber one / Even if you share some,” and it does not help that lines like this are often repeated far too many times.

It Was Easy is a great album. There are cer­tain prob­lems, the most promi­nent being the rel­a­tively unin­ter­est­ing lyrics, but there is really very lit­tle to crit­i­cize. Unfor­tu­nately, this does not mean the album is per­fect. There are a healthy num­ber of ter­rific sec­tions, but for the most part, tracks range from good to very good. It Was Easy is enjoy­able all the way through, in fact, there are lit­tle to no over­all bad spots. As a whole, It Was Easy is quite good, just not extraordinary.

This post is tagged 80-89, Title Tracks