Baltimore's GEOFFREY WELCHMAN has made two albums over the last few years. This second collection "One Band Man" has a little more of a band sound, but solo singer songwriter is still about right.
WELCHMAN'S strengths are in his guitar playing and his voice.
His funky acoustic guitar playing has a fluency and tautness that sets up a mood for sharply observed man-of-the-people songs. The damped chords and occasional solo runs sound simple, but make a lot of demands on technique. It’s sound that harks back to the early 1970s (the name Jim Croce comes to mind). A bit bluesy, a bit folksy, and varied enough to keep the album moving along very nicely.
WELCHMAN's voice has real panache too. He sings with a blues edge on a fairly strong tenor voice that can make the words stand out and keep a tune rolling.
The songs are a different matter. To my old ears this is a musician, like a fair number of others, driven to write their own material who would really do better to perform other people's songs. Despite multiple plays, I don’t have a tune, or even a melodic phrase, that comes back to me later. And the lyrics are just uncomfortable.
He obviously enjoys playing with words and inventing words. "Mohamedalidocious" is an early (for me) cringe-inducing example. He cares about internal rhymes and novel imagery, and he makes brave efforts to capture new situations and push his craft as far as he can. It's all there, very self-consciously done. But in the end, the songs really don’t work as he intended.
Take some lyrics from "Washes His Hands" as an example:
He could charm the pants right off you / And charm them right back on / And though he never ever means to do harm / As soon as he washes his hands / They're dirty again
These look a bit odd, they don’t read fluently, they don't rhyme. And in the song they don’t flow naturally in the tune. Worse yet, they present images that just don't fit together. WELCHMAN seems to be describing a plausible rogue - but with him washing and dirtying his hands and getting your pants off and on you have to wonder what kind of medical school this guy actually went to. What harm? Whose pants? Mine? Welchman's girlfriend's? Do we want this guy getting our pants off? And how is he getting his hands (or is it the pants?) dirty? It's not a song you want to stay with for too long.
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As with each of the songs, in fact, there is a germ of an idea and there are some artful phrases and observations. But they don't make sense. And if singer-songwriter is what we have, we demand a lot more cogency and deftness with the lyrics.
Take "Is it OK?", as another example. There are some decent barbershop harmonies to open up, giving way to lyrics that could be a brave attempt to capture male creepiness, in Alan Partridge territory. I hope that's what they are. But I don't feel confident that these lyrics are that knowing.
"Is it OK with you? / It's not that I seek permission / Cos what your dishin' / I love to take it / I only intend to show / you how well I know you / so we can make it through the moon and June …" and so on. It is very odd.
There is also a song of praise for Hildegard of Bingen, the 11th Century abbess, botanist and composer. And one about the McDonaldisation of the world called "Crowd Control" that starts:
"Weapons of Mass destruction / Cheeseburger and fries / Blow up a whole nation / change the system from inside"
Never mind "whole" being stretched across two notes when a two syllable adjective could surely have been found. However genuinely intended as a witty and condensed critique of consumer-led imperialism, it ends up as a preposterous fart gag - with the decade's most overused political gaffe to get it started. And there's loads more bathos where that came from.
Sorry Geoffrey, I just hope there are more people with your sense of humour and style and less with mine.
www.geoffreywelchman.com
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