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Album Reviews
Album Review: Balky Mule – The Length Of The Rail (FatCat)
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 16 March 2009
I don’t really like Balky Mule’s voice – he sounds a bit like Chris Martin – but his music, while not the most amazing music I have ever heard, rescues ‘The Length Of The Rail’ from going completely off the tracks. The intelligent folk sound with meandering guitar and drum machine is pleasant enough and perfectly acceptable as music to relax to. And everyone needs music to relax to, don’t they? It’s also tailor made for adverts, especially the song ‘Wireless’, which I can imagine hearing on a mobile phone commercial in my head already. Nevertheless, I’m kind of unimpressed. It’s so much less lovable than the rest of the FatCat repertoire, a bit too much like an early 2000s laptop bedroom project for my liking, harking back to a time when people were still impressed that you could add funny noises to your songs with amazing ease. And in doing just that, the songs have suffered and not reached their full potential, meaning that there’s nothing in there to really draw you back to the album again and again. Properly engaging with it almost becomes a chore on repeat listens, as do those Chris Martin vocal mannerisms. It’s a shame, because it does show some promise, but in the end it fails to hit the mark hard enough. PG
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