Like a lot of teenagers from his generation, Gary Douglas dreamed of playing in a rock and roll band. However, those dreams soon melted into the grown-up reality of college, law school, and life as a plaintiffs\u2019 attorney, sticking it to the man in a different way, suing misbehaving corporations. <\/p>\n
Then one day three decades or so later, the Trail Lawyer Hall of Fame attorney\u2014winner of nine-figure judgments against the likes of DuPont\u2014picked up his guitar again and started writing songs. His initial album 2014 Just Another Mile<\/i> might have been passed off as a wealthy man\u2019s midlife crisis, except for the fact that he turned right around and did it again, delivering Keepin\u2019 Faith<\/i> in 2016. Douglas\u2019 new album Deep In The Water<\/i>\u2014so named for a milestone water pollution case he won against Monsanto\u2014cements the reality that Douglas is entirely serious about what he\u2019s doing now: pursuing both the law and music-making, side by side.<\/p>\n
As for what Deep In The Water<\/i> sounds like, your number one clue is right there at the end of the liner notes: \u201cSpecial thanks to Southside Johnny for continued support and inspiration.\u201d With the Jersey sound championed by Southside and that other guy named Bruce as a basic template, Douglas adds inspiration from heartland rockers like Mellencamp and Seger, and brings his musical vision to life with a crack team of pros behind him, including producer\/mixer Niko Bolas (Neil Young, Warren Zevon), co-producer\/co-songwriter Darrell Brown (Keith Urban, Radney Foster), and a studio band that includes Raul Malo, Jerry Dale McFadden and Paul Deakin of the Mavericks, Jen Gunderman of the Jayhawks, and top Nashville session guitarist Josh Leo. (In case you were wondering what it\u2019s like to be a middle-aged indie-rocker with unlimited funds available to drop on your passion projects\u2026)<\/p>\n
The execution, as you might expect, is top-notch; what ultimately holds this album back is the quality of the songs the players have to work with. Deep In The Water<\/i> collects a group of earnest but clich\u00e9-ridden tunes that sometimes feel like homages to Douglas\u2019 musical heroes so complete and detailed as to tiptoe right up to the edge of parody. This is particularly true of opening cut \u201cRiver Road,\u201d such a meticulous recreation of a River<\/i>-era Springsteen anthem that you half expect to find the E Street Band lurking in the liner notes (but, no). Only the slightly higher pitch and softer edges of Gary Douglas\u2019 voice distinguish this from someone attempting to do Bruce karaoke on an obscurity from deep in the Boss\u2019 vaults. \u201cOne more kiss to keep me holdin on\u201d with a quick little sax break over the pounding piano as the background chorus lifts him up and yeahhh\u2026<\/p>\n
The fact that \u201cRiver Road\u201d segues into a gentle, swaying mid-tempo tune featuring accordion and sax had me fearing Douglas was about to start singing about \u201cthis boardwalk life,\u201d which might have ended things for us right there. Thankfully he sticks to his own script on the lyric, which is fine, a vague narrative about feeling like the light is \u201ca million miles away.\u201d The title track follows, a churning white soul number in which lyric doctor Brown labors to turn the story of Douglas\u2019s work on the Monsanto case\u2014which had to do with groundwater pollution\u2014into a decent song. It\u2019s not bad; it just feels forced in places.<\/p>\n
From there, Douglas tries on a number of musical guises. The thumping, playful soul-rock approach of numbers like \u201cOh My, Oh My\u201d and \u201cDo You Wanna Go\u201d seems to suit Douglas best. By contrast, the dark blues of \u201cDevil In Her Soul\u201d feels like a pose, and the pop-inflected blues-rock of \u201cWild Child\u201d is only somewhat more credible. The Dylanesque ballad \u201cNothing Ever Goes As Planned\u201d underscores just how difficult it is to write an explicitly political song and have it come off as anything other than ham-fisted. And \u201cWon\u2019t Say No\u201d wraps a serious acoustic ballad in production values that outstrip the quality of the lyric and vocal performance by a substantial margin. <\/p>\n
The last three songs here are ironically probably the strongest. \u201cDo You Wanna Go\u201d is an amiable come-on whose rather pedestrian lyric is elevated by a fervent soul-revue arrangement and punchy horn chart. \u201cLosing You\u201d veers back to heavy blues-rock and actually gets a bit of an SRV vibe going. And then closer \u201cSay What You Want To Say\u201d dials things back to just Douglas and Leo\u2019s strummed electric, a quiet song of determination that\u2019s one of his better ones.<\/p>\n
All in all, Deep In The Water<\/i> comes off like a sincere, modestly talented amateur giving it everything he has. Aided by a studio team of seasoned pros, Douglas offers up affectionately crafted pastiches of musical styles that he clearly admires, without ever breaking through and creating anything that feels truly memorable or original. The lesson seems to be that money and determination only get you so far; in the end it comes down to the strength of the material you have to work with, which here is average at best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":33656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[10281],"rating":[5619],"class_list":["post-45478","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-gary-douglas-band","rating-rating-c"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45478","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=45478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45478"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}