Review Summary: Not the Radin that once won you over, but there's still enough of him there for a pleasant listen.
"Guess who's back, back again"
Nah, sorry to disappoint, it's just Joshua Radin. Which is admittedly less exciting, maybe even less interesting than Eminem. Though you can't blame that on him, being the nice little folk rocker he was, is and probably always will be. After decades full of Dylan, Simon and all the others there's just not much left to explore, not much room for big surprises anymore. But as one of the modern J's in folk together with guys like Jack Johnson or Josh Ritter he definitely always had something that set him apart from these other guys. While Johnson only wants us to know how great life is and Ritter wants to tell us how great it was back then, Radin supposedly knows the secret ways to every woman's heart. And even if there were definitely some useless dead-ends amongst all these ways, they were also what made his whispering delivery so great at times. Shy, gentle, melancholic and desperate all at the same time, his songs managed to get under your skin every now and then. That's what made his debut great and that's what made
"Underwater" great back in 2012 when he came back from the depths of pop rock.
No need to be too hopeful though, because apparently something has changed. It seems like Radin once again said goodbye to misery and dares to be happy and free from all the baggage. That bastard! Yes,
"Onward & Sideways" might be his most light-hearted LP yet and it is also the one the strays from his lush, carefully played ballads the furthest. His sixth album is still riddled with calm down-tempo songs about the one and only feeling that matters, but as misplaced as that term is for a guy like Radin, he's actually gotten a little bit bolder. At his most daring he even embraces his new found love for country in the fast-paced
Let Our Sun Shine Down and fills it with a bouncy beat, a pedal steel and playful keys. As great as that sounds, in practice it comes off as both appealing and a bit goofy and makes Radin seem out of place.
He's just not the right one for something so "terribly noisy". That's why almost anything else from the remake of his
Beautiful Day - as a duet with Sheryl Crow - to his Elliot Smith imitation in
Away We Go is characterized by its focus on acoustic guitar. While those two only do the bare minimum not to bore you and make the singer-songwriter look quite uninspired, tracks like
Angels and
One and Only - the latter thankfully featuring background voice Priscilla Ahn in the best possible way - work to his advantage. While the first suffers the slightest bit from Radin's desire to sing rather than stick to his signature vocals,
One and Only does a better job. And it does so exactly because of the fragile whispering and eschewal of more than just light picking and sparse piano notes. Him making songs like this should be getting old by now, but if done right those are still worthy moments.
Nevertheless the albums best moments aren't exactly reminders of his original sound. What starts off with the e-guitar driven, mellow
We'll Keep Running Forever, quite a good track itself, leads to the most vital minutes on the record. The country-esque foot stomper
Belong has everything a song needs to make you sing along to it, gets a better grip on that old-fashioned sound. A little bit of banjo here, a little bit of strings there and a Joshua Radin in damn good form for an upbeat track of his. It is the logical next step after
Your Rainy Days introduced that style, which ties him to Mumford & Sons a little bit, on the predecessor.
And then there's
Another Beginning. Somehow the oddball on the record, it is almost completely carried by dissonant chords on the electric organ, only assisted by a dry beat and occasional piano and string entries. Ultimately the song ends up to be the most depressing and weighed down on here. And the most emotional.
Sadly especially the second half is a letdown in a way, being dominated by songs that are stuck between stripped down acoustic and his attempt to give a little variety by making them louder than necessary and fill them with the pedal steel and sterile strings.
That's why too much on
"Onward & Sideways" ends up in mediocrity to make it a truly worthwhile listen. After over a decade as a musician Joshua Radin is obviously experienced enough to not deliver a real flop. The arrangements are thought through, his singing more adept than years before and he still finds ways to add a new facet to his songs. Yet the crucial point is that his inoffensive lyrics and music lack the depth of his best work - just as the inglorious
"The Rock & The Tide" did. While he hits the right spot twice here, the search for something that matches the aura of
What If You or the sheer beauty of
In Her Eyes has to be an unsuccessful one. Radin left all those broken hearts and those hopelessly in love behind and while he did that, he lost a bit of his mojo, it seems. Not all of it though, one can still hear the guy that once managed to make so much out of so little.
Recommended tracks:
- Belong
- Another Beginning
- One And Only
