The title of the opening track, “The One I Love is Gone”, almost totally encapsulates the mood of the album. The song itself entirely reflects the title – gently reverberating, menacing electronic frequencies leading into an almost impossibly sad fiddle and gently plucked guitars…Lee’s soft, yet gritty voice bemoaning ”I’ll cry, I’ll even wanna die” over his loss.
The pace is picked up considerably as the band move into the title track, which initially sounds like a pretty much conventional slice of alt-country, but repeated listens reveal the depth to the instrumentation on the track – and the record as a whole – a persistent undercurrent of spacey, almost psychedelic organs, steel guitars and strings.
The album is anchored in ballad territory, and Lee’s songwriting, although strong, is not always quite of a high enough standard to stop the album at times from drifting into a slight feeling of ennui; at times, it sounds like you’ve already heard it all before, just a few minutes previously.
Having said that, more rocking tracks such as the aforementioned “Dark End Road” and “Too Young To Tell” add grist to the mill. Going back to Lee’s songwriting, many of the songs on this album, I feel, wouldn’t stand up particularly well as purely acoustic entities (not that that is a bad thing, of course); their strength is in the arrangements Lee sets them in. There’s a lot of musical talent on display here, and coupled with Lee’s impeccable production (helped along by Dusty Reske), the vision Lee carries with him is effectively realized. Certainly, it’s an infinitely more appealing credo than the slurry being proffered by such ‘luminaries’ as Ryan Adams and Jay Farrar nowadays.
