Saturday 13 June 2009

Album Review: Beerjacket - Animosity




Beerjacket, aka mild-mannered teacher Peter Kelly, released his sixth album, Animosity on Monday. It's really quite good too, so much so I'm managing to remember to write about it in something approaching timely fashion. Review is pushing it a bit, but let's try anyway shall we?

When you are a singer-songwriter with a guitar there's a whole bunch of people who you'll inevitably be compared to. Most of the time these comparisoms will be lazy and have little to do with your actual music, but sometimes one or two come along that are actually pretty accurate.

To my uneducated ears, there's a lot of Elliott Smith about this album. This is no bad thing, I love Elliot Smith.

Plus points of the album: It's really good. Fab songs. Sounds quite a bit like Eliott Smith. There's maybe some Nick Drake in there too. I mentioned it was good didn't I?

Minus points: It's short, only about half an hour, the songs are in and out in under 3 minutes generally. I'm struggling to say anything about it that doesn't just compare it to Elliott Smith again.

Animosity is out now to download from iTunes, eMusic
, LaLa and Amazon MP3. A physical CD version will be available for the first time at the launch show on 17th June in Oran Mor. A previous album, Great Unhappiness, can be downloaded for free here.

(Do I get to call this a proper review if I stick an arbitrary rating at the end? If so, 4 out of 5 stars.)