Albums

Album Review: James Hara

Album: Take Us The Foxes
Label: Electric Pig

Currently the music scene is full of singer-songwriters regaling us with their tales of love and woe. To this genre’s melting pot we can now add Irish-born Glasgow-residing James Hara. Can he stand out from the crowd?

Well, this album, Hara’s debut, is a collection of intelligent songwriting performed with a soft sensitive vocal and an understated, sympathetic finger-picked guitar. There are no frills - no chanting choir, no subtle drums and no classical backing instrumentation – which results in an uncluttered and crisp sound. Some might view the music as beautiful and haunting; others as bare and melancholic. Stand-out track, for me, is ‘Into The Nets’ where the chord sequence and vocal take on an especially dark and brooding quality. The mix of bottom and top strings combine to form a rhythmical bass-wash under a dancing arpeggio.

The other tracks fail to contain as much emotion and, in the main, are kept brief. There are only nine of them so the album doesn’t quite manage to last even half-an-hour, apologetically dying out at its end. Picking the right moment to enjoy an album with such a bleak world view would be difficult - perhaps when chilling out isn’t enough and you feel a combined need for quietude, melancholy and introspection. Not often then, which is why this album needs to standout to be the one you choose from your collection of alt-folk singer-songwriter albums you supposedly already own, which is ultimately where it fails.

The answer to the question posed then is, unfortunately, no. Although that doesn’t mean to say that James Hara can’t be successful, it just means he may have to think of developing his sound to incorporate something original, something that will define him above his peers.

For fans of: Nick Drake, Mark Kozelek, Iron & Wine
Band link = James Hara

This review originally appeared in Subba-Cultcha.

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