DONOVAN FRANKENREITER - Move By Yourself - 2006

DONOVAN FRANKENREITER - Move By Yourself - 2006 - Album review
HIGHLIGHTS: Fool - That's too bad - Girl Like You
RATING: 2/5
Initially I thought about taking this back to the shop and wanted to give Frankenreiter, Johnson and co. a flea in their collective ear for churning out over-produced ballad-lite sh*te. I mean, it's not like I was expecting Donovan to go all drum and bass but it did at first seem that this was written and produced so that Radio 1 Djs and their posse of gimps could fawn over the 'new Jack Johnson' and slot in any track off the album between James Blunt and Sandi f*cking Thom and then play all 3 tracks on a constant loop while reflecting on how they've really bought into the soul surfer lifestyle just because they once puked up behind the stage at a gig on Fistral Beach. But despite the fact that the over-production would have tossers like Phil Collins reaching for the phone to ask where they could get their own work to sound so clinical and although the tunes are slightly less accessible than the last CD, this has grown on me. Don has obviously realised that unless he took radical musical action he would have lost all sense of a separate musical identity as the Jack Johnson juggernaut rolled over him and absorbed him into some mighty balladeering snowball that releases albums that sound identical every year in a bizarre musical groundhog day. Mind you, when I say 'radical' I mean for Donovan. You do get a sense that's he's been listening to slightly more seventies west coast folk funk and folk rock and he manages to bung in hammond organs, harder guitars, a selection of strings and a couple of female session singers. And G Love. Again. Not that there's anything wrong with G but I find it hard to get rid of an image of kids Jack and Don living in a cartoon beach shack making music on the verandah while doting parents Ben Harper and G Love watch admiringly from hammocks.