REVIEW : Let's Just Be - Panpot.ca

By Ryan Clark


New album from the pop artist takes a dirty 180 degree turn. Panpot contributor Ryan Clark knows exactly what Joseph Arthur should do with his copy of ‘Exile on Main Street’.

Remember when you were eleven years old or so and you hijacked your stepfather’s copy of the White Album and listened to “Why don’t we do it in the road?” over and over again in your little sexless room and thought that Paul McCartney must be some sort of bad ass, sex crazed, maniac? Remember how you felt years later, sitting in your still sexless first year dorm room, staring at those big brown eyes on the 8 x 10 glossy, when you realized that Paul McCartney had probably never done it in road, wasn’t bad ass or dangerous at all, and had fooled you for years into thinking he was, by blanketing what was obviously a very thought out and heavily crafted song into the guise of a raw and pressing sound? No? Well that’s exactly how I feel about Joseph Arthur’s latest release,Let’s Just Be; like someone is trying to pass themselves off as being a down and out rocker willing to release an album, “warts and all if it has the right feeling,” when in reality we’re still dealing with the same dude who had a song on the Shrek 2 soundtrack, and has been aiming for the middle of the musical road for years.

I’m not sure what may have brought on the strange divergence, but he is consciously avoiding the sheen and polished pop of his previous efforts, choosing instead to go for a dirty, sloppy bar rock vibe, complete with way too much slide guitar and T-Rex style falsetto harmony vocals on nearly every track. There is nothing wrong with an artist trying to reinvent themselves in the light of a new sound; many of the best rock records of all time come from people attempting to radically mix up their comfortable scenes by bringing in styles of playing or genres of music that differ wildly from what they are famous for doing. It does however, take an artist with enough foresight and taste to be able to manoeuvre these changes convincingly, or without coming across as an impostor or a fraud. Unfortunately, Joseph Arthur hasn’t really succeeded on either of those two levels and it is a real mystery as to who he thinks will like this record: anyone who liked his previous releases probably won’t like the new, ragged sound and anyone who digs the Stones’ style rock and roll that he’s ripping off wouldn’t buy a Joseph Arthur record.

This record kind of sounds like the product of someone who wants to try to stick it to their record label, though I fear that this probably isn’t the case. Unfortunately there is either a serious lack of musical judgment or a complete lack of caring going on here. One listen through the 20 minute track, “Lonely Astronaut”, which I shit you not, contains a 10 minute plus section where Arthur repeats the word “I” a dozen or so times in a monotonous and banal mantra over top of a “psychedelic groove” until he transitions to the next word, “love,” repeating the same clever trick for a few more minutes, really solidifies this point that something just isn’t right. I can’t tell you if he ever reaches the much anticipated “you,” because I ripped the CD out of the machine and hurled it across the room before the song could reach its artist nadir.

I guess we can only hope that Arthur will lose his copy of Exile on Main Street and get back to making the kind of innocuous pseudo world music that we’ve come to expect from him.