Jonathan Rice: Further North (2007)-Ethan Smith
Johnathan Rice: Further North (2007)
By Ethan Smith
What do you get if you take away the guitar playing skills of John Mayer and leave everything else? Johnathan Rice! What do you get if you turn that bad version of John Mayer into a Conor Oberst wannabe? Johnathan Rice too! While Further North shows significant improvements on his less than average debut it’s still not very good, but it does have its moments. Most of the songs were co-written by Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley and other projects and when listening to some of these songs she didn’t help write you have to wonder just how much her “co-writing” consisted of when everything she touched is tolerable to good, everything else, with the exception of a few songs, is reaching for mediocrity but falling short.
Now one thing that plagues this album is its unoriginality, while most singer/songwriters can pull it off very well he can’t. When listening to this you keep expecting to hear a line like “Fathers be good to your daughters” and that proves to be a problem. Johnathan Rice at times sounds so similar to Mayer you can almost forgot who you’re listening to and the only real reminder is the cliché political images and lack of Mayer’s guitar lines. While most of this album is full of forgettable songs the opener “We’re All Stuck Out in the Desert” is a great pop-country song but the problem is songs like that are very rare.
All in all Johnathan Rice proves to be a fairly average songwriter that with the help from much more talented girlfriend Jenny Lewis can create some good songs, but the sad reality is once she’s done sleeping with him he’ll be back to where he was, writing bad to mediocre music and assuring us that trouble is real. But for now, in the words of the Beatles, he’ll get by with a little help from his friends.
Copyright C 2007 Ethan Smith