No Good At Being Cool

Pop crooner Drew Young’s second album is a collage of the personal, the painful and the poignant.

     

Pop crooner Drew Young’s second album is a collage of the personal, the painful and the poignant. The characters who inhabit these songs are lonely souls, grasping at whatever they can to keep from going under. Damaged by the complexities of life and failed relationships, they struggle constantly to keep their personal demons at bay. Listening to this collection, we get the sense that some of these characters are right on the verge of a permanent breakdown. Drew underscores that idea with a haunting lyricism and a loose rhyming scheme that sometimes makes it sound like the character is simply struggling for something to say. On “Beautiful Loser,” for instance, we hear him sing: “If I had a place to be/ I’d be there and not here/ I can’t sleep and I’m a wreck right now.” There’s a kind of bitter irony at work here, too. Drew masterfully juxtaposes his tortured stories with contagious pop grooves that seem to belie his haunted lyrics. It’s as if his characters are pretending to be happy despite their isolation and resignation. “Hats Off To You” is so catchy and danceable that it stays with you despite its acid-sour lyrics of “hats off to you my sweet, I threw your clothes out in the street, and now I’m free.” Musically speaking, there are lots and lots of influences here. That’s very fitting considering the many musical environments Drew has been a part of. Among other places, he lived in Athens, Georgia, during the heyday of its musical renaissance of the early 1980s. More recently he spent a number of years in New Orleans, a town that literally boils over with innovative performers. It would be impossible to be a singer-songwriter in such places, and not be affected by all that creativity. Perhaps that’s why Drew’s music is a fusion of styles and influences. It’s pop-gumbo, if you will. There’s a lot of really fine guitar work here, under-dubbed with slight traces of dreamy electronica and drum work. The music on this album is similar to that of Beth Orton’s, but the comparison is certainly not a perfect one. Ultimately, the only way to understand Drew’s music is to hear it first-hand. Every true artist is also original, despite all of the borrowing that is inevitable in music, and Drew is certainly no exception to that. Pop Music is his medium, and he uses it to create a canvas that is a reflection of his true artistic self. What more could one ask from a performer?