Jaunty Ryan Adams-lite alt-country starts off reasonably well with the breezy California Wildflower, a pretty decent chunck of Americana written for dirt roads, but the cliche riddled If I Had A Dollar tumbles into a denim clad rock and roll dance number that would embarass Dolly Parton at her cheesiest. Meanwhile there’s the reasonably chirpy Lonelytown, which firmly sets out Kamp’s stall as a purveyor of derivative, simplistic, if inoffensive tunes.
There’s a danger with Kamp that he’ll drown in comparisons to musicians who have brought more verve to the standard rhythms he dabbles with, an occasionally hint of wry humour isn’t enough to make his musical style any more distinguishable than a hundred other Southern rock stalwarts.
There’s a little more swagger to a track like God’s Little Acre with some particularly fun old-school organ playing, elsewhere (Down at the) 7th Heaven opens with maudlin trumpets and pensive keys, but Kamp’s voice feels a bit too clean lacking the emotional grit that would help sell the track’s tale of a man getting some well deserved rest. Right As Rain is a pretty decent piano driven ballad, though Kamp occasionally sounds like a member of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.
Ultimately as each new track dredges up memories of other songs it becomes a little wearying, sure it’s all played well and there’s clearly a passion lurking behind the music, but it seems to have walled Kamp in to a certain ammount of faithfulness to the expectations of rock and soul and either he doesn’t have any new ideas or is a little timid about really playing with the genre conventions.
Quite simply, at the end of the day, how much you’re going to enjoy this record relates to your passion towards MOR country rock. Kamp won’t challenge any of your favourite recording artists for prominence on your record player, but you’d happily let his tracks play out if the shuffle mode picked them out of the audio soup.
[Rating:2]
