Strong Effort: Richard Swift |
This young singer-songwriter is a member of the school of West Coast pop eccentrics who count Tom Waits, Harry Nilsson, and Van Dyke Parks as professors emeritus. On The Novelist and Walking Without Effort, two self-released mini-albums Secretly Canadian has reissued as a two-CD set, Swift attempts to outfit his handsome acoustic-guitar ballads with big-band trimmings he can’t afford; you hear where the budget-bin horn arrangements and sloppy vocal harmonies are going, even if they don’t quite get there. As a result, the music exudes an appealingly ramshackle quality neatly complementing lyrics that detail his search for something to grasp onto amid the tumult of the outside world. “I need to sing with all I have,” he proclaims in “As I Go,” Effort’s swinging highlight. Good for him for doing so.RICHARD SWIFT + WALKMEN | Avalon, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | June 29 | 617.228.6000
On the Web
Richard Swift: http://www.richardswift.us/
