Matt Costa - 'Songs We Sing' (Island/Brushfire) Released 27/02/06

It's hard to begrudge Costa for wishing to steer clear of excess excitement, high velocities and daring stunts after a bone-shatteringly serious accident brought his career as a pro skateboarder to a premature end, but even that's not a valid excuse for the limp, lifeless, soul-sapping substitute for music that seeps from these 14 tracks. Whether he’s tackling desultory raids at Brendan Benson’s power-pop factory ('Cold December'), turgid tearjerkers more tepid than epic ('These Arms'), sanitized stabs at psych-folk whimsy unlikely to worry Devendra Banhart et al ('Astair'), 60’s pastiches pedestrian enough to make Oasis resemble revolutionary trailblazers (‘Oh Dear’) or boom-chicka-boom-powered cod-country crassness ('Sweet Rose'), Costa's tunes are incessantly insipid and, at times, amateurishly awkward, struggling to make the transition from one section to the next without collapsing to baffling heaps of loosely connected chords and lyrics seemingly culled from a cliché generator.

But if Costa lacks consistency and determination in the songwriting department, he has surplus of both when it comes to navigating a steady course on the middle of the road, with all the beige blandness and lacklustre listlessness that implies, not that you'd expect anything less from an artist signed to perma-chilled background muzak maestro Jack Johnson's label.

What little lure is left after such an onslaught of third-rate tunecraft and unwavering devotion to dullness is torpedoed by Costa's voice, which achieves the impossible by quickly becoming more grating than James Blunt's yelp by persisting with the kind of whingeing whine usually heard in the proximity of US pop-punk bollocks, whilst his weak vocal delivery packs all the conviction, focus and phrasing skills of a first-round reject at a Pop Idol spin-off.

 

If this is what major labels consider worthy of pushing down consumers’ throats, they should surely be more worried about the alarming state of their hearing capabilities than plummeting profits and illegal downloads.