Demos

Ryan Inglis - [Ryan Inglis]

Owain Paciuszko 23/05/2009

Rating: 2/5

Opening track (after the pointless 13 seconds of Intros) Feel Any Feeling marks Ryan Inglis as a purveyor of carefully strummed, guitar-body drummed, singer-songwriter material. It's in the Jack Johnson or Newton Faulkner mold and is okay in a totally vanilla kind of way, which, from an initial aesthetic point of view, is a shame as the cover art of this LP is brilliant, imaginative and eye catching; whereas the music is reasonable, uninspired and drifts into the background.

For You is content to amble down the same path, forcing me to rack my brains for the names of more bland singer-songwriters who I don't necessarily despise but I generally don't give two hoots about. Some bass comes in on There's A Scene, but everything else remains the same. And on and on it goes with very little happening and each song blurring into the other with the similar strokes, riffs, stops and starts of general singer-songwriter armed with an acoustic guitar territory and maybe this somehow connects with some people (chart history of other 'artists' suggests thus) but, for me, I need a bit more feeling - be it joy or anger or misery - and a touch more invention in both the arrangment and lyrics. Having someone singing 'Would you forgive me?' over and over with no sense of regret while a rather chirpy guitar twiddles in the background just doesn't reach me on any level at all.

Perhaps this is a problem with having some degree of expectation from cover art? I was actually looking forward to playing this CD after a string of rather poor covers, and was a tad baffled by what I was hearing and thought to myself, maybe he's building up slowly over the course of the album and that ideas will creep in here and there. But, nope, it's the same thing ad nauseum and though this isn't - not by a long shot - an absolutely awful record, it is totally bland.