Music is the medicine which Drew Holcomb prescribes as "a way of finding hope and meaning in the sorrow and confusion of life".
No prizes for guessing that healing from the pains caused by love is the album's primary theme.
This is Holcomb's seventh studio album and is released on his own imprint, Magnolia Music. To keep things fresh it was recorded over just 8 days near his home in East Nashville. No studio trickery was added when each song was done.
No such restraint is applied to the lyrical content which is laden with mixed metaphors and convoluted similes.
In American Beauty, the love he lost had "eyes like the Grand Canyon" and a kiss "like a loaded gun".
In Heartbreak he recalls how "I held you like a fire and you held me just like a blanket".
On Tightrope he feels "like an old soul...a sinking ship" and the lovesickness takes its toll to the point that on the concluding track (When It's All Said And Done) he is reduced to lamenting how "my heart feels like the hard wood of the kitchen floor".
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The cumulative effect of all this self conscious pseudo poetry is that even the most basic of concepts tend to sound a little pompous and contrived. Sure, love can be an Avalanche, a melody or a fire but is the heartbreak it causes really as mysterious as he makes out?
Quieter, and relatively simple, songs like You'll Always Be My Girl and Ain't Nobody Got It Easy work best although there's also some merit in the rousing Springsteen-esque The Last Thing We Do.
All told, for all the confident and forthright country-rock delivery this brand of medicine doesn't offer the cure-all it promises.
Drew Holcomb's website
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