The music business today is a notoriously difficult environment for pop-rock singer-songwriters not afflicted with the disease of fashion. The name of the game today is lowest common denominator, all the way, which leaves many a superbly talented composer\/performer without a record deal. Think about it; Shawn Mullins, Matthew Sweet and Pete Droge have sold millions of units and earned the wide respect of their peers, but they were all without a record deal until they joined forces recently to record an album (due this summer) as The Thorns.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, the Internet and the indie\/d-i-y underground is able to keep resourceful artists like Bryan Master scratching out a living doing what they do best. Master, a young New York-based singer-songwriter, is possessed of obvious talent and an equally obvious disinclination to make least-common denominator pop music, placing him squarely on the Mullins-Sweet-Droge career track.<\/p>\n
On his debut album Lost At Sea<\/i>, Master’s songs are presented like a series of little paintings, each with its own distinct palette and approach. One of the best is “737,” a dreamy traveler’s reverie that starts out acoustic and builds nicely with rich, precise electric chords. Another standout is the sparkling piano ballad “Bring Out The Stars,” an artfully-drawn narrative of an “old-friend-in-town” date that simmers with conflicted subtext (“You bring out the best \/ You bring out the worst \/ You’re from Venus and I am from Mars \/ Baby you bring out the stars”).<\/p>\n
Thinking like a major-label A&R guy, though, I have to zero in on “Reunion Of Sorts,” just the kind of witty, catchy, stream-of-consciousness-over-rhythmic-acoustic-guitar gem that landed Shawn Mullins in the Top Ten. Indeed, its steady-building verses, beefed-up electric chorus and well-arranged harmony vocals make comparisons to “Lullabye” almost inevitable. Master shows commendably little interest in sticking to a formula, though; the minute “Reunion” fades out, you dive right into “Meteor(ite),” a sardonic skewering of celebrity culture with an edgy Elvis Costello vibe and numerous musical twists and turns.<\/p>\n
Lost At Sea<\/i> finds Master experimenting quite a bit, as a young artist should. And while his experiments aren’t always successful — in particular, I found his vocal affectations on tracks like “Meteor(ite)” and “Californ.I.A.” less attractive than his normal, very expressive voice — his stumbles are brief and considerably fewer than you might expect on a 25-year-old’s self-published debut. His lyrics in particular show a lot of promise, decorated with striking images like “The baby blue tide on a surfer’s silhouette \/ As the sun’s about to set” and acerbic little asides like “I wish I didn’t know me better.”<\/p>\n
The emergence of John Mayer suggests to some that a resurgence of popular interest in singer-songwriters is possible. Personally, I’m skeptical, especially given my view that Mayer’s hit album was artistically compromised by its slick production. Regardless of what the future brings for the singer-songwriter genre as a whole, though, this smart, rangy debut marks Bryan Master as a talent to watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":26328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6821],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-37556","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bryan-master","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37556"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=37556"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=37556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}