In a perfect world, where I had more time and patience with artistic endeavors to do such things, I would take the album cover photo you see to your left and work on it a bit. It would be redone in such a way where the blue background has worn away in a circular pattern to reflect the record inside, something that you may see when you find the old records that belonged to your grandpa in his dusty attic because the covers have rubbed together for decades. It would do justice to this very recent release by Chicago-based singer and songwriter Logan Metz, who looks about 30 and sounds like he’s twice as old – to hear him sing, his voice reminded me a lot of Willie Nelson for some reason.
Yet while Logan occasionally works his way into very retro country territory, such as the honky tonk of the title track or the hopeless romance of Augustine, this album would have fit in perfectly with old standards of sixty years gone by. To be sure, this review should have been done on a throwback Thursday.
I’ll have to concede I don’t do tongue-in-cheek humor and irony nearly as well as Metz does, whether it’s on this track called Interesting People, the title song, or the ending Lullaby (For Everybody But My Baby (And Me)) – yes, we can all go to bed already. You just have to smile at the reference to dropping his last remaining quarter in the last remaining payphone in L.A. (indeed, that is how the lyric goes.) When I saw the song title I was wondering how Logan would get around to it and he didn’t disappoint me.
In the credits list for this eleven-track release I counted a dozen musicians, and Metz uses them to create a plethora of styles and moods, from the sultry Almost (All Mine) to the piano-based ballads I Got A Woman (one of the best songs of the collection) and Surrender, which gets the stringed instruments involved to good effect. Metz also gets bluesy (and boozy) with An Evening At The Cove, but redeems himself with the gospel overtones of I Must Be Found.
Yet because Metz takes a lot of musical chances with this collection – and be warned, those who are really into anything put out as popular music over the last decade are going to be completely lost with this record – they don’t always pay off. Perhaps I didn’t get the joke of The Rabbits, but I have to say Logan’s foray into Beatles territory called Jericho utterly missed the mark. But don’t let these missteps dissuade you from adding this to your collection if you like mature music that sounds so honest you’d swear this was recorded as analog all along. I’ve done my share of reviews of music that is technically dazzling because every note was perfectly placed by a computer program, so to have the backdrop I heard of a faint recording hiss is not a bad thing at all. (Or else I need new headphones. But I think it was Logan’s record.)
As a debut album, Metz sets the bar rather high and it leaves him with a lot of possible directions to proceed. And considering he financed the effort through Kickstarter (a little tidbit I learned from his social media) it looks like he has a bit of an audience already. I don’t know if this little corner of the world has a lot of fans of music your parents thought was retro, but if there are they should enjoy the listen.