Mike Rosenberg’s 2012 breakthrough, All The Little Lights, struck a chord with so many listeners because it was refreshingly honest, delightfully unconcerned with how many copies it sold and not worried if it sounded cool or otherwise to the hipster kids in their pointy shoes. Here was a songwriter unafraid to bare his heart, soul and lungs to the world and if you didn’t like him, you didn’t have to buy a ticket.
While the Brighton-born, Aussie-based singer still insists he is his own man (“I write songs that come from the heart/ I don’t give a fuck if they get into the chart or not” – ‘27’) this listener can’t shake the feeling that Rosenberg’s incredible success over the last two years has possibly put undue pressure on him to rush out another record before the embers of ...Lights had fully cooled.
While he’s still capable of delivering drop-dead gorgeous love songs in the shape of the ridiculously simple ‘Heart’s On Fire’ or ‘Coins In A Fountain’, the latter of which could be a companion piece to the million-selling ‘Let Her Go’, one can’t shake the feeling that Rosenberg isn’t operating on full cylinders, lyrically, here. Where he generally veers from astute to acerbic, even when he’s singing about the age old issues of the heart, there are lapses into tweeness this time around, especially on the Mariachi-tinged ‘Thunder’, which it seems was written with the Big Book of Animal Similes open on the desk.
‘Riding To New York’ is the biggest culprit. A road song about a dying man cycling to New York, fuelled by tar-black lungs, to see his grandson and make amends with his children, it sees Rosenberg laying on the melancholy thicker than a Grey’s Anatomy box-set. I can’t escape the thought that it sounds like a not-so-subtle calling card for an artist eager to break the lucrative US market, which manages to fit dying, redemption and forgiveness into a song that name-checks more American states and towns than the AA road-map.
It’s a real conundrum, because when he gets it right, as on the self-doubting title track, the stunning ‘Scare Away The Dark’ or the bittersweet ‘Rolling Stone’, Rosenberg is an expert at crafting beautifully affecting, haunting melodies – and his throaty voice exudes just the right amount of melancholy to worm its way through the world weary walls of the heart and drag out of the bloody strings inside. Hear it and decide for yourself...