REVIEW : Let's Just Be - Daily Pennsylvanian

by Rafael Garcia, 

Let's Just Be is the perfect example of pop gone wrong. Joseph Arthur had previously distinguished himself as a talented singer-songwriter and critic's darling on albums like the excellent Our Shadows Will Remain. Let's Just Be, however, is a disjointed, overlong mess that tries to do too much and fails miserably in the process.

Things start off strong. Opener "Diamond Ring" is an old-fashioned rock song reminiscent of the Stones. The second track, "Good Life," starts to throw up red flags, though, employing a minute-long intro of strange water sounds over incoherent mumbling, before finally starting off another decent retro rock offering. The rest of the album goes back and forth between soft acoustic numbers, decent pop rock attempts and vexing, failed deviations into Tom Waits-style experimentalism. The worst of this last category is a ten-minute-long song outro. It grates the ears and, awkwardly placed halfway through the record's massive 80-minute length, kills the album's momentum. Arthur should probably stick to what he's good at-brevity.

"Let's Just Be" is the last thing Arthur's producers and managers should have said. The album would have been vastly improved with some judicious cutting. This record is perhaps half an hour of worthwhile recordings spread far, far too thin.