[rating=3.00]
Music critics and fans alike have long droned on about the inability of musical road warriors – concert-focused bands like Tea Leaf Green – to produce a decent studio listen. While that onus doesn’t apply to every album in the cosmos, it definitely applies to Tea Leaf Green’s Looking West. It’s hard to make anything besides a tired argument about an album as creatively weary as this one, since it contains no new material and doesn’t strive to be anything more than a release for it’s own sake.
The most jaded fan couldn’t dream up this album’s regrettable recording scenario: With the bassist and vocalist at the production helm, the band took a bunch of songs that have long populated their setlists and banged them out in the studio over a three-day span. One assumes that the frenetic pace of recording was an attempt to wring some of the band’s live juice into the studio’s sterile bucket. If so, then the opposite effect was achieved here. Instrumental solos that normally flow are jarringly placed and sound inconsistent with the body of the songs. Moreover, this album contains far too little of Josh Clark’s guitar playing, which is a shame, since the band has proven so adept at highlighting Clark within the songs of Trevor Garrod over the years.
Looking West is a lyrically focused album, which often works against it. Lyrics like "I can’t get high/I can’t stay low/I will get by/I will stay home" are surprisingly derivative, and most of the subject matter is overtly innocuous. It’s a struggle to connect with anything other than an occasional party-pandering passage, and rare are the moments where anything memorable is sung. In trying to pay attention to the songs, boredom quickly became an issue. As Cali-folky and genuine in their approach as Tea leaf Green are, Looking West isn’t the direction the band should be heading.
