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CD review: Ray LaMontagne ‘God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise’
Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs
‘God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise’
(RCA/RED)
Grade: C
Over the past few years, raspy-voiced folk rocker Ray LaMontagne has found a great deal of success by straddling the line between mass-produced Starbucks soundtrack fodder and indie folk. His early hit “Trouble” still enjoys a good amount of play time on television and elsewhere, and with good reason, as it’s a decent song. Its popularity, however, is in a sense symbolic of LaMontagne’s career as a whole - good but not great.
His latest release, “God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise,” doesn’t deviate from this trend, offering up a few nice moments surrounded by a lot of what more or less amounts to filler. The album opener, “Repo Man,” kicks off with an instrumental (and uninteresting) blues jam. When LaMontagne jumps in with his Joe Cocker vocals, there is something undeniably catchy about it, but nothing about the track is particularly memorable.
The same can be said about the weepy “New York City’s Killing Me,” as well as the title track, which feels strangely underdeveloped for something that is supposed to represent the collection as a whole. The highlight of the album is the toe-tapping country rocker “Beg Steal or Borrow,” which has already been released as a single. Even that track seems to be missing something, though. The core verse, which begins with LaMontagne lamenting his small-town roots, “so your hometown’s bringing you down/are you drowning in the small talk and the chatter” has classic written all over it, but the rest of the song doesn’t pack the same punch. When LaMontagne turns back to the opening verse at the end of the song, it feels almost as if he only did so because he wasn’t able to come up with anything better.
Things only get worse from there, with midtempo shuffle “This Love Is Over” dragging the album into elevator music territory. Though it’s not quite enough to kill “God Willin’,” LaMontagne is not doing himself any favors.
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By Jessica Mebane
August 17, 2010 10:43 AM | Link to this
You s*ck, and RLM killed it on this album. Enjoy your Katy Perry and diet coke, Mary.