Joe Hicks shares the same name as a 1960s black American R&B singer but the two artists couldn’t be more different.
The clean-cut British Hicks was raised in the rural market town of Newbury and his white man’s blues are rendered as predictable commercial pop.
The eleven songs on his debut full-length album are bright, catchy and melodic but come straight out of the ‘how to write a love song’ handbook with no alarms and no surprises.
The falsetto vocals indicate he’s been studying the hits of The Bee Gees and the personable guy image recalls that of James Blunt.
In the trapped in the suburbs song Mirror Mirror he asks the universe to ”show me a world that’s better than this” but in the other tunes the quest for true love is his primary concern.
Hicks says “'The Best I Could Do at the Time' is a journey through many of the emotional peaks and troughs we go through as humans” but is far less ambitious than this statement suggests.
In the opener Sail Away,the unambiguous message is to the effect that “love is all I need”, a line with a universal resonance albeit being just about as clichéd as it gets.
