Review Summary: A singer/songwriter album that grows on you the more you listen to it, showing its intricate details.
Todd Warner Moore has been around for a while and “Overnight Flight” is his sixth album proper. Still, Warner Moore might not exactly be a household name with many listeners. This can be the case with many artists that try to make music that doesn’t instantly grab you by the throat but try to impress you in incremental steps showing the intricacy of their music by slowly unveiling all the elements involved.
In such cases, when you have an artistic output behind you, by the time you reach your album number six, things can go several ways. One way is that you can further develop your art by introducing all these new elements that will enhance your music. The other is that you stick blindly to your guns, with inertia creeping in, and your albums start to sound one and the same.
Luckily, on “Overnight Flight” Warner Moore is taking the first road. You can hear that from the opening title track. Todd has refined his songwriting so much that, while you feel where he is coming from musically, all the influences have meshed into something really personal. Of course, you can faintly hear that Warner Moore knows Van Morrison’s Seventies and Eighties albums very well, but also that he has had his ears open to more current troubadours like M. Ward and Andrew Bird (“Rite of Rain”).
Still, he leaves the listener to guess, if they are up to it, or they can just enjoy all the little details he has incorporated into his music, like on the excellent “Big Blue Wave.” Very often, the devil’s in the detail, in this case, those details make Todd Warner Moore’s “Overnight Flight” such a quality listen, particularly very late at night. Will more listeners notice? Hopefully, yes.
