AUBURN - INDIAN SUMMER
Scarlet Records

In their first album since 2005, Auburn offer up a selection of acoustically driven songs that are perhaps best described as an acquired taste. At least, that’s the case with vocalist Liz Lenten, who is the most immediately impactful part of these tracks, with her breathy childlike voice being entrancing or irritating, depending on your point of view – and on the track being performed. And if you remove her from the equation, you’re left with a pretty bland record.

Upbeat jazz-folk numbers like opener Shame On You manage to pull of the trick of allowing her quirky voice to at least avoid being irritating; ballads like Only the Strong and the title track tend to expose her weaknesses, and this is a problem, because these tracks make up the bulk of the album. The latter track, in fact, feels like the very worst of laid back jazz – meandering, tuneless and effortlessly annoying. It’s clearly supposed to be a chill-out number, but for this writer, it actually had quite the opposite effect.

Some other tracks, like Free Spirit are less aurally annoying, but do suffer from another album-wide tendency – namely rather glib ‘life affirming’ lyrics about seizing the day, grabbing the moment and generally acting like someone from a tampon commercial - on This is the Life, we're offered up a constant stream of inanities like 'this is the life/make sure you live it/there's no second chance/you can't forgive it' and 'stop complaining, time goes by too fast/just live every day as if it were your last/take every opportunity to savour every hour/you can make it happen, that's your power' - just what someone stuck in a soul-sucking job with a family to support will love to hear I bet.

This might be an unfair criticism – if you like your music relentlessly positive and full of hippy sentiments, you might well feel differently. And you’ll probably love horrible reggae number Day Dreamin’, which I can easily see armies of stoned, dreadlocked, trying-too-hard white thirty-somethings grooving to at some grisly small-scale festival.

Too Far from Home benefits from a fiddling appearance by Eliza Carty – but she can’t really lift the song, simply because it’s another one-dimensional effort. While there is nothing wrong with simple lyrics and simple music, they need some honest emotion to work – and I couldn’t hear any of that here. Instead, it all felt rather contrived and calculated, more simplistic than simple, and left me cold. I’m afraid.

DAVID FLINT

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