Johnston is a folk troubadour of the hard travellin’, dusty roads variety, offering wry observations on the ups, downs and sideways of life as we think we know it. He has an attractively expressive voice, plays basically competent guitar, and tosses off superb harmonica solos whenever the song demands. Those songs are aided and abetted by variations of the standard folk-rock line-up, for example, Paul Johnson’s fretless bass pays its way handsomely on the plaintive instrumental ‘Ballet For Aisling’ .
On the crackling good ‘Sweet Are The Words’ and the melancholy dirge ‘Pottstown PA’, Johnston comes on a bit Lloyd Cole, but elsewhere he’s in obvious thrall to Bob Dylan, sometimes to his detriment, as in the Bob-awful ‘Talkin’ Galway Buskin’ Festival’.
‘Sticks And Stones’ is a superb look at the problem of childhood bullying, and his apocalyptic vision comes to the fore in ‘Before The War’, while ‘International Bar’ is a warm tribute to the songwriters’ club that used to inhabit the greatest pub in the world ... ever. ‘Bridge Street Blues’ is a haunting song that improves with repeated listens, ‘Sixteen Years Today’ deals with the point where adolescence crosses the border into adulthood, but ‘More From Jesus’ is trite and mawkish.
Johnston’s insistence on overusing rhyming couplets of equal length makes some of the songs more monotonous than they need to be. But he’s got all the basics in place and as soon as he crawls out Dylan’s window he could be a truly original force to reckoned with.