Content area
Full text
ROCK
Dan Parsons
Old Brown Shoe
(Independent) *** 1/2
THAT sepia-toned cover image says it all. Brisbane songwriter Dan Parsons, all of 20 years old, serves up a debut eight-tracker that's as warm and comfy as a beat-up old shoe.
Parsons' easy-rolling finger-picked acoustic guitar flows as easily as his smooth voice. He'll probably still have to cop some James Taylor comparisons, but Parsons is now sounding more like himself than the sum of his influences.
The Morning After, a sun-dappled country-rock number, receives a sparkling treatment with string quartet and pedal steel, the kind of thing that might have turned up on some Laurel Canyon gem from Judee Sill or the like. Slow Saturday needs nothing more than Parsons' intricate acoustic-guitar style and his voice, but the pick here is one of the newest songs, Coast to Coast, a hungover-while-driving-to-see-the-girl tune.
In general, the lyrics need more attention -- the subjects don't have the raw edge and emotional weight that the likes of JT, Joni Mitchell or Jackson Browne could summon in their early years.
But Parsons is a charismatic stage performer (as might be judged by the queue at the merch desk after his show supporting Bobby Flynn this month), and this album is a taster to a talent we are sure to be hearing more from.
Noel Mengel
ROCK
Counting Crows
Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings
(Geffen) ****
"THIS is a list of what I should have been but I'm not," wails the ever-self-loathing Adam Duritz on the new Counting Crows album. Luckily, the album was one of the items on his to-do list he actually got around to doing, after five years of drip-feeding fans with a best-of, live album and re-release.
But the wait has been worth it: Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is the band's strongest effort since 1996's Recovering the Satellites. As the Empire State Building on...