Genre: Rock/Folk Year: 2003 Country: USA Official Site: Teitur Details: Tracks & Audio Label: Universal
It's wuss-boy music, and what's wrong with that?
Gentle, understated drums; acoustic guitar; some well-chosen keyboard additions and strings; and, of course, a soft-voiced young man who just stepped off his stool at the local college-friendly coffee shop and onto his own record.
Pictures of the vaguely cherubic lead singer-songwriter Teitur Lassen are a smattering within the dulled, scratched impressionistic artwork on the album.
My favorite track, "I Was Just Thinking," uses his sad young man's loss of love—in this case, a melancholy look at long-distance love that doesn't wither from the death of love, but the death of nearness—to perfection: "I think about long-distance rates instead of kissing you babe / I'm a singer without a song / If I wait for you longer my affection is stronger I / I was just thinking , merely thinking / This boat is sinking … " The track is birthed and held by Lassen's acoustic guitar, but there's a nice introduction during choruses of those well-chosen strings I mentioned. Touches like that are what recordings are for when a single coffee-shop balladeer sounds a little too lonely up there all by himself with nothing but a quavering voice, an old guitar and a microphone.
Boy finds girl in "To Meet You" and "One & Only." Sad girls are sad figures of a boy's musings in "Josephine" and "Amanda's Dream." Every young man and young girl finds himself wistfully propelled into these moments when they hear these sometimes cliché subjects because the thing about cliches is, they're true.
Best of all, unlike the vocal stylings of that soft-spoken, sentimental pretty-boy—John Mayer—you can understand what Lassen is saying. Whatever happened to intelligible lyrics, even if they're not all that intelligent? Don't you want to know exactly what that poor kid is singing about, why he's obviously so torn up?
P.S. Those little keyboard touches I mentioned? They're the brainchild of keyboardist Patrick Warren, whose work has graced most notably the early albums of Michael Penn. Do yourself a favor and buy one of those, huh?
Recommended for fans of: John Mayer, Michael Penn, folky pop (like the Indigo Girls, with less impressive lyrics), earnest coffee-shop guitarists.
Teitur Poetry & Aeroplanes
