Oh, Stanton Meadowdale does not pave a smooth road into his mind, but if you venture to travel down that gravelly path you'll be rewarded. Or you won't. He doesn't really care, I think -- insomuch as any commercial artist can be said to not care if he develops an audience. Maybe a more accurate description is that Meadowdale is an artist who seeks to attract like minds, and has the fortitude to withstand critical arrows from those who just don't "get it".
Then again, one could argue that Meadowdale is simply drunk. It wouldn't be hard to imagine, given the fact that his delivery regularly approaches inebriated tunelessness. His songs are ballads, all born of love and loss, and he spares us no hardship but instead gives us the good with the bad, inviting us to sort it out alongside him. His style is partly acoustic balladeer and partly grand showman, even if only in the cobwebs of his head. The stripped-down, purposely diluted production values evoke the ghosts of lush string arrangements, permeating the disc with a dreamlike flair. "Waiting By the Phone" and "I'm a Fool" recall the Merseybeat-blues of the British invasion, as channeled through an idealistic young American from Denton, TX. Is this a collection of inner musings, dark thoughts and dismal observations, performed with a raw yet heartfelt beauty by a dangerously candid performer? Or is it just a garage album experiment, filled with sour notes and songs that stop before they really get started?
It may be both.
Meadowdale is honest, or so he'd have us believe. "I could just keep you waiting by the phone / But that's another song / And I wouldn't wanna keep you hanging on," he sings on "Waiting by the Phone". But, then, what's this song about?... He's also forthright, as on "Pardon Me", where he tells the judge "there's a girl I wanna see / I'm gonna steal her from her man / I'll do it with my rock and roll band." He takes the boozy Eurotrash angle with "Dreaming of Her", the album's ostensible masterpiece despite (or perhaps due to) its bombastic, confessional-epic nature. "Girl" allows him to warble and growl like a deep Southerner, wrapping his mouth sideways around phrases like "all the good folks say our love is just a sin" while cribbing a chord progressions from Our Lady Peace. "Lazy Love" is an amalgamated march/waltz/lullaby/love letter, covering much ground in a short time. In fact, the entire album clocks in at under half an hour, with the longest track only 2:38. Anyone who can cram this much musicality into so small a vessel deserves recognition for concision alone.
The disc isn't perfect. On tracks like "King of Carlton Cigarettes" and "Empty Hall", the delivery and audio effects employed create distance between the listener and performer, the latter resulting in something barely listenable for its distorted vocals. The generally polluted production will make you wonder what these tracks might sound like all cleaned and polished, and there are enough sour notes throughout the disc to get a commercial performer dropped from his label -- so why, in Meadowdale's hands, does it all sound authentic and irreplaceable? Somehow, if done perfectly, the effect of these songs would be lost in their dulled edges. In their own way, they already are performed flawlessly, warts and all.
